About 3Advance
Their mission is to allow entrepreneurial leaders, and with their passion for technology, take their vision to life. They make it work for their team. By considering family & personal choice of location and work plan, they allow every team member to make the environment that most suits them and allows them to grow. They believe that they prosper when their clients prosper.
Services
Mobile App Development
Web Development
UI-UX Design
Web Design
3Advance Reviews
Write a ReviewPenetration test that found things our previous vendor had missed for two consecutive years
Omar Al-Farsi / Chief Technology Officer - Falcon Digital Ventures
Verified
May 24, 2026
May 24, 2026
Project summary: A previous engagement had delivered something that worked in staging and struggled in production. We approached this project with greater rigour in vendor selection as a result.
The thing that retrospectively seems most significant is how little drama there was. Complex technology projects tend to accumulate incidents, escalations, and tense conversations. This one did not. Problems were surfaced before they became incidents. Scope changes were handled with process rather than conflict. Risks were managed rather than avoided. That level of maturity is rare in my experience and it made the delivery feel almost effortless from our side, which I know it was not from theirs.
PROS
Clear and consistent communication adapted appropriately for both technical and non-technical stakeholders, shared tooling that gave our team real-time visibility, reliable sprint delivery throughout
CONS
Their insistence on a detailed functional specification before development began felt like friction at the time. In retrospect, it was the reason the development phase ran without the ambiguity that has derailed similar projects for us previously
Project TypeCybersecurity
IndustryHuman Resources
Project CostLess than $10,000
DurationJul 2025 – Feb 2026
Questions & Answers
Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.
Falcon Digital Ventures operates in the Human Resources sector with headquarters in Dubai, UAE. In my role as Chief Technology Officer I am accountable for the full technology agenda — infrastructure, product, and vendor relationships. We are a commercially driven organisation and every technology decision is evaluated against a clear business case before it is approved.
What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?
We had a defined product vision for our next phase of growth in the Human Resources market but lacked the engineering depth internally to execute it. The Cybersecurity requirements in particular required specialist experience that we could not realistically recruit for on the timeline our business plan required.
What services did the company provide for your project?
The core engagement was Cybersecurity delivery, though their scope expanded to include technical consultancy during discovery that materially improved our requirements. They also took ownership of the third-party integration workstream that had been a coordination challenge in previous projects, removing that complexity from our internal team entirely.
Why did you choose this company over other providers you considered?
The quality of the questions they asked during the briefing process was the first indicator. Vendors who ask precise questions in the sales phase tend to apply the same rigour during delivery. That hypothesis proved accurate. The technical proposal was substantive, the team structure was senior throughout, and the pricing was transparent.
How clearly did the company understand your requirements and business goals?
Thoroughly and precisely. The requirements document they produced was detailed enough that our QA team used it directly to write acceptance criteria. Every user story had a defined business objective attached. Nothing was left to interpretation. That discipline in the requirements phase paid dividends throughout development and testing.
How was your overall experience with their communication and project management?
Outstanding. The discipline around asynchronous communication was particularly effective given the time zones involved between Dubai, UAE and the delivery team. Written updates were specific and consistent, response times were same-day for anything that required a decision, and nothing fell through the cracks across a six-month engagement.
Did the company deliver the project on time and within your expected budget?
On time and within the approved budget. The estimation accuracy was notable — they had broken the work down in sufficient detail during discovery that their forecast proved reliable throughout, rather than being a number that shifted with every change in scope. We received one change request and it was for scope we had introduced ourselves.
What tangible results or business impact have you seen since the project was completed?
The most direct measure is the performance of the system in production. In the five months since go-live we have had zero P1 incidents, our page performance scores have improved across every Core Web Vitals metric, and two enterprise clients who had cited our previous platform limitations during contract negotiations have since renewed without that objection arising.
What did you like most about working with this company?
The post-launch behaviour. Some vendors consider go-live to be the end of their professional obligation. This team treated it as the transition to a different kind of engagement. The hypercare period was substantive, the documentation was thorough and genuinely useful, and they checked in proactively at the thirty-day and ninety-day marks to review production metrics with us.
Would you recommend this company to others, and would you work with them again?
Unreservedly. We are in active scoping conversations for a second engagement and I expect this to develop into a multi-year partnership. For any organisation in the Human Resources sector looking for Cybersecurity expertise combined with genuine delivery discipline, I would put this team at the top of the evaluation list.
Virtual environment that our remote team now uses as their primary collaboration space
Erik Lindqvist / Chief Technology Officer - Nordic Cloud AB
Verified
May 21, 2026
May 21, 2026
Project summary: Our agents were spending more time managing data across disconnected systems than managing relationships. We needed a unified platform to give them that time back.
What made the most difference in practice was the quality of the engineering judgment on this team. Not the ability to execute a specification — that is a baseline expectation. The ability to recognise when a specification was suboptimal, explain why, propose an alternative, and support the client in making a decision about it. That consultative dimension elevated the output beyond what the brief described and resulted in a product that is more fit for purpose than the one we had originally specified.
PROS
Architectural decisions designed for longevity rather than just the current brief, thorough automated test coverage, post-launch stability that validated every technical choice made during discovery
CONS
Their discovery process is more rigorous than we were accustomed to and required more preparation from our side than we had initially allocated — but the quality of what followed justified every hour of it
Project TypeAR/VR Development
IndustryReal Estate
Project Cost$500,000+
DurationJun 2025 – Mar 2026
Questions & Answers
Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.
Nordic Cloud AB is an established Real Estate organisation headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden. My role as Chief Technology Officer covers both strategic planning and operational technology delivery. We maintain high standards for our vendors because our clients hold us to high standards — a bar we expect our partners to meet.
What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?
A competitive threat had accelerated our roadmap. We had planned a significant AR/VR Development investment for the following year. External pressure moved that timeline forward by six months and required us to find an external partner rather than attempting to build internally in the time available.
What services did the company provide for your project?
The core engagement was AR/VR Development delivery, though their scope expanded to include technical consultancy during discovery that materially improved our requirements. They also took ownership of the third-party integration workstream that had been a coordination challenge in previous projects, removing that complexity from our internal team entirely.
Why did you choose this company over other providers you considered?
We ran a structured shortlisting process across five vendors. The technical evaluation eliminated two immediately. Of the remaining three, this team's proposal was differentiated by the specificity of their AR/VR Development approach and the evidence base they provided — reference projects in Real Estate contexts, not generic case studies. The reference calls confirmed a track record that the proposal had described accurately.
How clearly did the company understand your requirements and business goals?
Thoroughly and precisely. The requirements document they produced was detailed enough that our QA team used it directly to write acceptance criteria. Every user story had a defined business objective attached. Nothing was left to interpretation. That discipline in the requirements phase paid dividends throughout development and testing.
How was your overall experience with their communication and project management?
The project management framework was the most structured I have experienced with an external vendor. Sprint planning was tight, acceptance criteria were specific, retrospectives were honest and acted on. The project manager treated the shared backlog as a live document and the risk register as an operational tool rather than a compliance artefact. I never had to ask for a status update.
Did the company deliver the project on time and within your expected budget?
The project landed on time. The budget was managed within the agreed ceiling, which included one client-driven scope addition that was quoted fairly and handled without affecting the original delivery stream. The discipline around budget transparency throughout meant there was no surprise at invoice stage.
What tangible results or business impact have you seen since the project was completed?
Quantifying the impact precisely is complicated by other variables in our business, but the metrics we can attribute directly to the AR/VR Development work are meaningful: session duration up, conversion rate up, error rate down, and our NPS for the digital touchpoint has improved by eleven points. Our account managers report that the new capability is coming up positively in client conversations.
What did you like most about working with this company?
The post-launch behaviour. Some vendors consider go-live to be the end of their professional obligation. This team treated it as the transition to a different kind of engagement. The hypercare period was substantive, the documentation was thorough and genuinely useful, and they checked in proactively at the thirty-day and ninety-day marks to review production metrics with us.
Would you recommend this company to others, and would you work with them again?
Yes, without reservation. I have already made two direct referrals within my Real Estate network — in both cases to peers facing AR/VR Development challenges similar to ours. I gave those referrals with confidence because I knew the experience I described was reproducible, not the result of exceptional circumstances on our engagement.
Commerce platform that handled peak-day traffic at twelve times normal load without incident
Nisha Pillai / Director of Engineering - GrowthBridge Ventures
Verified
May 12, 2026
May 12, 2026
Project summary: Our audience data was fragmented across eight tools with no single identity layer. Personalisation had become impossible without first solving the data foundation.
Our stakeholder group included board members, clinical leads, compliance officers, and end users — each with different technical literacy and different success criteria. This team navigated that stakeholder landscape as well as any vendor I have seen. They adjusted their communication register depending on the audience without losing the substance. They managed expectations honestly throughout. And they delivered a system that each group can point to as meeting their requirements. That breadth is genuinely uncommon.
PROS
Collaborative culture that made the team feel like a genuine extension of our organisation, strong asynchronous communication across time zones, zero-drama handling of the inevitable mid-project changes
CONS
Time zone coordination required some deliberate overlap management from both sides in the first couple of sprints, after which we had an efficient async rhythm that worked for the whole project
Project TypeE-commerce Development
IndustryMedia & Entertainment
Project Cost$150,000 to $499,999
DurationJul 2025 – Feb 2026
Questions & Answers
Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.
As Director of Engineering at GrowthBridge Ventures I oversee technology investment and delivery across our Media & Entertainment operations in Pune, India. We are a commercially focused business and our technology choices are always evaluated in terms of their direct contribution to business outcomes rather than technical elegance alone.
What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?
Regulatory requirements in our Media & Entertainment segment had changed and the compliance timeline was set by our regulator, not by us. The E-commerce Development changes required were significant enough to justify engaging a specialist partner rather than diverting our internal team from the product roadmap.
What services did the company provide for your project?
Primarily E-commerce Development, with adjacent work in solution architecture and quality assurance. They were responsible for the full build from requirements through to go-live, including integration with four existing systems in our technology landscape. The breadth they covered without requiring additional vendors was commercially and logistically valuable.
Why did you choose this company over other providers you considered?
The quality of the questions they asked during the briefing process was the first indicator. Vendors who ask precise questions in the sales phase tend to apply the same rigour during delivery. That hypothesis proved accurate. The technical proposal was substantive, the team structure was senior throughout, and the pricing was transparent.
How clearly did the company understand your requirements and business goals?
Better than we managed ourselves going in. The workshops they facilitated surfaced assumptions we had not examined and exposed three requirements that were in direct conflict with each other. Resolving those before development began saved us what would certainly have been significant rework later in the project.
How was your overall experience with their communication and project management?
The project management framework was the most structured I have experienced with an external vendor. Sprint planning was tight, acceptance criteria were specific, retrospectives were honest and acted on. The project manager treated the shared backlog as a live document and the risk register as an operational tool rather than a compliance artefact. I never had to ask for a status update.
Did the company deliver the project on time and within your expected budget?
Yes. I had privately built a contingency expectation into my planning given the project complexity and the number of integrations involved. None of that contingency was needed. The delivery landed on the agreed date and the final invoice matched the approved budget to within a fraction of a percent. That outcome is rarer than the industry acknowledges.
What tangible results or business impact have you seen since the project was completed?
We went live four months ago. User adoption exceeded the target we had set by 23 percent in the first month. Support ticket volume has dropped measurably. The features we had deferred because the previous architecture made them prohibitively expensive to build are now in development. The platform they built has opened our roadmap.
What did you like most about working with this company?
The post-launch behaviour. Some vendors consider go-live to be the end of their professional obligation. This team treated it as the transition to a different kind of engagement. The hypercare period was substantive, the documentation was thorough and genuinely useful, and they checked in proactively at the thirty-day and ninety-day marks to review production metrics with us.
Would you recommend this company to others, and would you work with them again?
Absolutely. With a specific note that the value starts in the discovery phase — clients who approach that process with seriousness will get the most from the engagement. We invested appropriately at the front end and the returns are evident in what was delivered.
Managed IT that made our internal teams forget infrastructure was something they once worried about
Aoife Brennan / VP of Product Engineering - Emerald Digital Ltd
Verified
May 04, 2026
May 04, 2026
Project summary: Our actuarial models had outgrown the reporting infrastructure feeding them. Data latency was introducing risk into pricing decisions that the business had decided it could no longer accept.
Our stakeholder group included board members, clinical leads, compliance officers, and end users — each with different technical literacy and different success criteria. This team navigated that stakeholder landscape as well as any vendor I have seen. They adjusted their communication register depending on the audience without losing the substance. They managed expectations honestly throughout. And they delivered a system that each group can point to as meeting their requirements. That breadth is genuinely uncommon.
PROS
Architectural decisions designed for longevity rather than just the current brief, thorough automated test coverage, post-launch stability that validated every technical choice made during discovery
CONS
Time zone coordination required some deliberate overlap management from both sides in the first couple of sprints, after which we had an efficient async rhythm that worked for the whole project
Project TypeIT Managed Services
IndustryInsurance
Project Cost$50,000 to $149,999
DurationOct 2025 – Mar 2026
Questions & Answers
Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.
I lead technology at Emerald Digital Ltd, a growth-stage Insurance business based in Dublin, UK. As VP of Product Engineering my remit spans product engineering, platform operations, and strategic vendor partnerships. We had reached an inflection point where our internal capacity was not sufficient to execute our roadmap at the pace our market required.
What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?
A competitive threat had accelerated our roadmap. We had planned a significant IT Managed Services investment for the following year. External pressure moved that timeline forward by six months and required us to find an external partner rather than attempting to build internally in the time available.
What services did the company provide for your project?
Primarily IT Managed Services, with adjacent work in solution architecture and quality assurance. They were responsible for the full build from requirements through to go-live, including integration with four existing systems in our technology landscape. The breadth they covered without requiring additional vendors was commercially and logistically valuable.
Why did you choose this company over other providers you considered?
We had a failed engagement behind us and were more rigorous in our selection process as a result. We asked detailed questions about how they managed scope change, how they handled estimation, and how they communicated problems. The answers were specific, evidenced, and consistent across the team members we spoke to. That gave us confidence that the process was real rather than rehearsed.
How clearly did the company understand your requirements and business goals?
Thoroughly and precisely. The requirements document they produced was detailed enough that our QA team used it directly to write acceptance criteria. Every user story had a defined business objective attached. Nothing was left to interpretation. That discipline in the requirements phase paid dividends throughout development and testing.
How was your overall experience with their communication and project management?
Professional and efficient. The project manager maintained a clear view of the critical path at all times and communicated changes to it transparently. The one significant scope adjustment we made mid-project was handled through a clean change request process — fairly priced, clearly documented, and absorbed without disrupting the overall timeline.
Did the company deliver the project on time and within your expected budget?
Yes. I had privately built a contingency expectation into my planning given the project complexity and the number of integrations involved. None of that contingency was needed. The delivery landed on the agreed date and the final invoice matched the approved budget to within a fraction of a percent. That outcome is rarer than the industry acknowledges.
What tangible results or business impact have you seen since the project was completed?
We went live four months ago. User adoption exceeded the target we had set by 23 percent in the first month. Support ticket volume has dropped measurably. The features we had deferred because the previous architecture made them prohibitively expensive to build are now in development. The platform they built has opened our roadmap.
What did you like most about working with this company?
The post-launch behaviour. Some vendors consider go-live to be the end of their professional obligation. This team treated it as the transition to a different kind of engagement. The hypercare period was substantive, the documentation was thorough and genuinely useful, and they checked in proactively at the thirty-day and ninety-day marks to review production metrics with us.
Would you recommend this company to others, and would you work with them again?
Yes, without reservation. I have already made two direct referrals within my Insurance network — in both cases to peers facing IT Managed Services challenges similar to ours. I gave those referrals with confidence because I knew the experience I described was reproducible, not the result of exceptional circumstances on our engagement.
Online store that our fulfilment and finance teams are as happy with as our customers are
Rupert Ashford / Director of eCommerce - Hargrove Retail PLC
Verified
May 04, 2026
May 04, 2026
Project summary: Warehouse management inefficiencies were adding cost and introducing errors at a rate that was becoming visible to clients. A modernised WMS was the agreed solution internally — we needed a partner to build it.
Our stakeholder group included board members, clinical leads, compliance officers, and end users — each with different technical literacy and different success criteria. This team navigated that stakeholder landscape as well as any vendor I have seen. They adjusted their communication register depending on the audience without losing the substance. They managed expectations honestly throughout. And they delivered a system that each group can point to as meeting their requirements. That breadth is genuinely uncommon.
PROS
Commercially transparent throughout — no hidden assumptions, no bill shock at the end, change requests that were fair and clearly explained rather than used as a margin-recovery mechanism
CONS
Time zone coordination required some deliberate overlap management from both sides in the first couple of sprints, after which we had an efficient async rhythm that worked for the whole project
Project TypeE-commerce Development
IndustryLogistics & Supply Chain
Project Cost$10,000 to $49,999
DurationAug 2025 – Feb 2026
Questions & Answers
Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.
As Director of eCommerce at Hargrove Retail PLC I oversee technology investment and delivery across our Logistics & Supply Chain operations in Manchester, UK. We are a commercially focused business and our technology choices are always evaluated in terms of their direct contribution to business outcomes rather than technical elegance alone.
What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?
Regulatory requirements in our Logistics & Supply Chain segment had changed and the compliance timeline was set by our regulator, not by us. The E-commerce Development changes required were significant enough to justify engaging a specialist partner rather than diverting our internal team from the product roadmap.
What services did the company provide for your project?
The core engagement was E-commerce Development delivery, though their scope expanded to include technical consultancy during discovery that materially improved our requirements. They also took ownership of the third-party integration workstream that had been a coordination challenge in previous projects, removing that complexity from our internal team entirely.
Why did you choose this company over other providers you considered?
The quality of the questions they asked during the briefing process was the first indicator. Vendors who ask precise questions in the sales phase tend to apply the same rigour during delivery. That hypothesis proved accurate. The technical proposal was substantive, the team structure was senior throughout, and the pricing was transparent.
How clearly did the company understand your requirements and business goals?
Comprehensively. The discovery phase they ran was more thorough than anything we had experienced with previous vendors. They challenged requirements that were vague or contradictory, proposed alternatives where our initial thinking was limiting, and produced a functional specification that our internal stakeholders agreed was the clearest articulation of the product they had seen written down.
How was your overall experience with their communication and project management?
Professional and efficient. The project manager maintained a clear view of the critical path at all times and communicated changes to it transparently. The one significant scope adjustment we made mid-project was handled through a clean change request process — fairly priced, clearly documented, and absorbed without disrupting the overall timeline.
Did the company deliver the project on time and within your expected budget?
Yes. I had privately built a contingency expectation into my planning given the project complexity and the number of integrations involved. None of that contingency was needed. The delivery landed on the agreed date and the final invoice matched the approved budget to within a fraction of a percent. That outcome is rarer than the industry acknowledges.
What tangible results or business impact have you seen since the project was completed?
The ROI case we presented to our board was conservative by design. Current performance against the financial model suggests we will hit the projected payback point in under twelve months against an eighteen-month target. The operational efficiency gains in particular have exceeded the model, in part because the quality of the data the new platform generates supports decisions that the previous system could not.
What did you like most about working with this company?
The willingness to be direct. When our requirements were unclear they said so. When our priorities were contradictory they explained why. When a technical approach we had assumed was the right one turned out to have significant downsides, they told us before we had committed to it. That kind of intellectual honesty is what I look for in a long-term technology partner.
Would you recommend this company to others, and would you work with them again?
Absolutely. With a specific note that the value starts in the discovery phase — clients who approach that process with seriousness will get the most from the engagement. We invested appropriately at the front end and the returns are evident in what was delivered.
A partnership that began with a single project and earned a place on our preferred vendor list
Declan Hartley / Chief Digital Officer - Southern Cross Technology
Verified
Apr 22, 2026
Apr 22, 2026
Project summary: The project had a board-facing delivery date tied to a strategic initiative. We needed a partner who would treat that date as their own, not ours.
Our stakeholder group included board members, clinical leads, compliance officers, and end users — each with different technical literacy and different success criteria. This team navigated that stakeholder landscape as well as any vendor I have seen. They adjusted their communication register depending on the audience without losing the substance. They managed expectations honestly throughout. And they delivered a system that each group can point to as meeting their requirements. That breadth is genuinely uncommon.
PROS
Senior-level engineering presence throughout the entire project, not just during the pitch, honest and commercially fair handling of scope changes, codebase that our internal team praised on review
CONS
The quality of documentation they produce means our team needed to set aside dedicated review time to do it justice — a minor scheduling point rather than a genuine criticism
Project TypeEmbedded Systems Development
IndustrySports & Fitness
Project Cost$150,000 to $499,999
DurationMay 2025 – Mar 2026
Questions & Answers
Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.
Southern Cross Technology is an established Sports & Fitness organisation headquartered in Sydney, Australia. My role as Chief Digital Officer covers both strategic planning and operational technology delivery. We maintain high standards for our vendors because our clients hold us to high standards — a bar we expect our partners to meet.
What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?
The immediate problem was that our Embedded Systems Development capability had become the bottleneck limiting our ability to grow. Every feature request, every new client requirement, every internal initiative was delayed by a platform that had been extended beyond its original design. We needed a rebuild, not a patch.
What services did the company provide for your project?
Primarily Embedded Systems Development, with adjacent work in solution architecture and quality assurance. They were responsible for the full build from requirements through to go-live, including integration with four existing systems in our technology landscape. The breadth they covered without requiring additional vendors was commercially and logistically valuable.
Why did you choose this company over other providers you considered?
We ran a structured shortlisting process across five vendors. The technical evaluation eliminated two immediately. Of the remaining three, this team's proposal was differentiated by the specificity of their Embedded Systems Development approach and the evidence base they provided — reference projects in Sports & Fitness contexts, not generic case studies. The reference calls confirmed a track record that the proposal had described accurately.
How clearly did the company understand your requirements and business goals?
Extremely well, in part because they had relevant Sports & Fitness experience that reduced the context-setting overhead significantly. They understood the domain vocabulary, asked the right questions, and translated business requirements into technical specifications with a fidelity that meant the development phase had very few clarification cycles.
How was your overall experience with their communication and project management?
Outstanding. The discipline around asynchronous communication was particularly effective given the time zones involved between Sydney, Australia and the delivery team. Written updates were specific and consistent, response times were same-day for anything that required a decision, and nothing fell through the cracks across a six-month engagement.
Did the company deliver the project on time and within your expected budget?
Yes. I had privately built a contingency expectation into my planning given the project complexity and the number of integrations involved. None of that contingency was needed. The delivery landed on the agreed date and the final invoice matched the approved budget to within a fraction of a percent. That outcome is rarer than the industry acknowledges.
What tangible results or business impact have you seen since the project was completed?
We went live four months ago. User adoption exceeded the target we had set by 23 percent in the first month. Support ticket volume has dropped measurably. The features we had deferred because the previous architecture made them prohibitively expensive to build are now in development. The platform they built has opened our roadmap.
What did you like most about working with this company?
Their instinct for keeping the business objective visible throughout technical decision-making. I have worked with technically excellent teams who lose the strategic thread as complexity increases. This team maintained a clear connection between every architectural choice and the outcome we had agreed to achieve. That orientation made the trade-off conversations significantly easier.
Would you recommend this company to others, and would you work with them again?
Yes, without reservation. I have already made two direct referrals within my Sports & Fitness network — in both cases to peers facing Embedded Systems Development challenges similar to ours. I gave those referrals with confidence because I knew the experience I described was reproducible, not the result of exceptional circumstances on our engagement.
IoT architecture that scaled from pilot to full fleet without a single redesign
Abdullah Al-Shehri / Head of Innovation - Desert Tech Ventures
Verified
Jan 09, 2026
Jan 09, 2026
Project summary: Our internal product thinking was strong but our execution capability in this specific technology domain was limited. We needed depth, not generalism.
The integration layer was the part of the project I was most concerned about going in. Our system landscape is complex, several of the upstream APIs we relied on were poorly documented, and two third-party vendors had a history of unpredictable response times on integration questions. This team managed all of that. They documented what the upstream vendors could not, built resilience into the integration architecture where the upstream behaviour was unreliable, and delivered a solution that works as specified in production. I could not have asked for more.
PROS
Commercially transparent throughout — no hidden assumptions, no bill shock at the end, change requests that were fair and clearly explained rather than used as a margin-recovery mechanism
CONS
We underestimated the input required from our subject matter experts during the requirements phase. The team flagged this early but our resource planning did not fully reflect it — our responsibility, not theirs
Project TypeIoT Development
IndustryMining & Metals
Project Cost$500,000+
DurationJun 2025 – Dec 2025
Questions & Answers
Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.
Desert Tech Ventures operates in the Mining & Metals sector with headquarters in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. In my role as Head of Innovation I am accountable for the full technology agenda — infrastructure, product, and vendor relationships. We are a commercially driven organisation and every technology decision is evaluated against a clear business case before it is approved.
What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?
The immediate problem was that our IoT Development capability had become the bottleneck limiting our ability to grow. Every feature request, every new client requirement, every internal initiative was delayed by a platform that had been extended beyond its original design. We needed a rebuild, not a patch.
What services did the company provide for your project?
The scope covered the full IoT Development lifecycle: discovery and requirements definition, solution architecture, iterative development across twelve sprints, integration testing, performance validation, production deployment, and a structured four-week hypercare period. They also provided system documentation and a knowledge transfer programme for our internal team.
Why did you choose this company over other providers you considered?
We ran a structured shortlisting process across five vendors. The technical evaluation eliminated two immediately. Of the remaining three, this team's proposal was differentiated by the specificity of their IoT Development approach and the evidence base they provided — reference projects in Mining & Metals contexts, not generic case studies. The reference calls confirmed a track record that the proposal had described accurately.
How clearly did the company understand your requirements and business goals?
Thoroughly and precisely. The requirements document they produced was detailed enough that our QA team used it directly to write acceptance criteria. Every user story had a defined business objective attached. Nothing was left to interpretation. That discipline in the requirements phase paid dividends throughout development and testing.
How was your overall experience with their communication and project management?
Outstanding. The discipline around asynchronous communication was particularly effective given the time zones involved between Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and the delivery team. Written updates were specific and consistent, response times were same-day for anything that required a decision, and nothing fell through the cracks across a six-month engagement.
Did the company deliver the project on time and within your expected budget?
Yes to both. There was a single sprint where a dependency on a third-party API introduced a one-week delay. The team identified it three weeks in advance, presented two mitigation options, and we agreed on an approach that recovered the schedule within the same sprint cycle. That level of foresight is what separates good project management from reactive problem management.
What tangible results or business impact have you seen since the project was completed?
We went live four months ago. User adoption exceeded the target we had set by 23 percent in the first month. Support ticket volume has dropped measurably. The features we had deferred because the previous architecture made them prohibitively expensive to build are now in development. The platform they built has opened our roadmap.
What did you like most about working with this company?
Their instinct for keeping the business objective visible throughout technical decision-making. I have worked with technically excellent teams who lose the strategic thread as complexity increases. This team maintained a clear connection between every architectural choice and the outcome we had agreed to achieve. That orientation made the trade-off conversations significantly easier.
Would you recommend this company to others, and would you work with them again?
Unreservedly. We are in active scoping conversations for a second engagement and I expect this to develop into a multi-year partnership. For any organisation in the Mining & Metals sector looking for IoT Development expertise combined with genuine delivery discipline, I would put this team at the top of the evaluation list.
Immersive experience that generated more media coverage than anything we had shipped before
Vikram Srinivasan / Head of Platform - Cascade EdTech Solutions
Verified
Jan 09, 2026
Jan 09, 2026
Project summary: The project had a board-facing delivery date tied to a strategic initiative. We needed a partner who would treat that date as their own, not ours.
What made the most difference in practice was the quality of the engineering judgment on this team. Not the ability to execute a specification — that is a baseline expectation. The ability to recognise when a specification was suboptimal, explain why, propose an alternative, and support the client in making a decision about it. That consultative dimension elevated the output beyond what the brief described and resulted in a product that is more fit for purpose than the one we had originally specified.
PROS
Clear and consistent communication adapted appropriately for both technical and non-technical stakeholders, shared tooling that gave our team real-time visibility, reliable sprint delivery throughout
CONS
Time zone coordination required some deliberate overlap management from both sides in the first couple of sprints, after which we had an efficient async rhythm that worked for the whole project
Project TypeAR/VR Development
IndustryGaming & Gambling
Project Cost$150,000 to $499,999
DurationSep 2025 – Dec 2025
Questions & Answers
Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.
I lead technology at Cascade EdTech Solutions, a growth-stage Gaming & Gambling business based in Chennai, India. As Head of Platform my remit spans product engineering, platform operations, and strategic vendor partnerships. We had reached an inflection point where our internal capacity was not sufficient to execute our roadmap at the pace our market required.
What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?
We had a defined product vision for our next phase of growth in the Gaming & Gambling market but lacked the engineering depth internally to execute it. The AR/VR Development requirements in particular required specialist experience that we could not realistically recruit for on the timeline our business plan required.
What services did the company provide for your project?
Primarily AR/VR Development, with adjacent work in solution architecture and quality assurance. They were responsible for the full build from requirements through to go-live, including integration with four existing systems in our technology landscape. The breadth they covered without requiring additional vendors was commercially and logistically valuable.
Why did you choose this company over other providers you considered?
A trusted peer in the Gaming & Gambling sector had used them for a comparable AR/VR Development engagement and their recommendation was unequivocal. Our own due diligence confirmed the pattern they described. The combination of domain knowledge, AR/VR Development depth, and demonstrated delivery discipline was the deciding factor.
How clearly did the company understand your requirements and business goals?
Extremely well, in part because they had relevant Gaming & Gambling experience that reduced the context-setting overhead significantly. They understood the domain vocabulary, asked the right questions, and translated business requirements into technical specifications with a fidelity that meant the development phase had very few clarification cycles.
How was your overall experience with their communication and project management?
The project management framework was the most structured I have experienced with an external vendor. Sprint planning was tight, acceptance criteria were specific, retrospectives were honest and acted on. The project manager treated the shared backlog as a live document and the risk register as an operational tool rather than a compliance artefact. I never had to ask for a status update.
Did the company deliver the project on time and within your expected budget?
The project landed on time. The budget was managed within the agreed ceiling, which included one client-driven scope addition that was quoted fairly and handled without affecting the original delivery stream. The discipline around budget transparency throughout meant there was no surprise at invoice stage.
What tangible results or business impact have you seen since the project was completed?
We went live four months ago. User adoption exceeded the target we had set by 23 percent in the first month. Support ticket volume has dropped measurably. The features we had deferred because the previous architecture made them prohibitively expensive to build are now in development. The platform they built has opened our roadmap.
What did you like most about working with this company?
The willingness to be direct. When our requirements were unclear they said so. When our priorities were contradictory they explained why. When a technical approach we had assumed was the right one turned out to have significant downsides, they told us before we had committed to it. That kind of intellectual honesty is what I look for in a long-term technology partner.
Would you recommend this company to others, and would you work with them again?
Unreservedly. We are in active scoping conversations for a second engagement and I expect this to develop into a multi-year partnership. For any organisation in the Gaming & Gambling sector looking for AR/VR Development expertise combined with genuine delivery discipline, I would put this team at the top of the evaluation list.
End-to-end IoT solution with firmware, cloud, and dashboard that all actually talk to each other
Takashi Morimoto / Director of IT Strategy - Sakura Digital KK
Verified
Jan 02, 2026
Jan 02, 2026
Project summary: Our agents were spending more time managing data across disconnected systems than managing relationships. We needed a unified platform to give them that time back.
The integration layer was the part of the project I was most concerned about going in. Our system landscape is complex, several of the upstream APIs we relied on were poorly documented, and two third-party vendors had a history of unpredictable response times on integration questions. This team managed all of that. They documented what the upstream vendors could not, built resilience into the integration architecture where the upstream behaviour was unreliable, and delivered a solution that works as specified in production. I could not have asked for more.
PROS
Collaborative culture that made the team feel like a genuine extension of our organisation, strong asynchronous communication across time zones, zero-drama handling of the inevitable mid-project changes
CONS
Their discovery process is more rigorous than we were accustomed to and required more preparation from our side than we had initially allocated — but the quality of what followed justified every hour of it
Project TypeIoT Development
IndustryReal Estate
Project CostLess than $10,000
DurationMar 2025 – Nov 2025
Questions & Answers
Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.
I lead technology at Sakura Digital KK, a growth-stage Real Estate business based in Tokyo, Japan. As Director of IT Strategy my remit spans product engineering, platform operations, and strategic vendor partnerships. We had reached an inflection point where our internal capacity was not sufficient to execute our roadmap at the pace our market required.
What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?
We had a defined product vision for our next phase of growth in the Real Estate market but lacked the engineering depth internally to execute it. The IoT Development requirements in particular required specialist experience that we could not realistically recruit for on the timeline our business plan required.
What services did the company provide for your project?
The core engagement was IoT Development delivery, though their scope expanded to include technical consultancy during discovery that materially improved our requirements. They also took ownership of the third-party integration workstream that had been a coordination challenge in previous projects, removing that complexity from our internal team entirely.
Why did you choose this company over other providers you considered?
We ran a structured shortlisting process across five vendors. The technical evaluation eliminated two immediately. Of the remaining three, this team's proposal was differentiated by the specificity of their IoT Development approach and the evidence base they provided — reference projects in Real Estate contexts, not generic case studies. The reference calls confirmed a track record that the proposal had described accurately.
How clearly did the company understand your requirements and business goals?
Better than we managed ourselves going in. The workshops they facilitated surfaced assumptions we had not examined and exposed three requirements that were in direct conflict with each other. Resolving those before development began saved us what would certainly have been significant rework later in the project.
How was your overall experience with their communication and project management?
Outstanding. The discipline around asynchronous communication was particularly effective given the time zones involved between Tokyo, Japan and the delivery team. Written updates were specific and consistent, response times were same-day for anything that required a decision, and nothing fell through the cracks across a six-month engagement.
Did the company deliver the project on time and within your expected budget?
The project landed on time. The budget was managed within the agreed ceiling, which included one client-driven scope addition that was quoted fairly and handled without affecting the original delivery stream. The discipline around budget transparency throughout meant there was no surprise at invoice stage.
What tangible results or business impact have you seen since the project was completed?
Quantifying the impact precisely is complicated by other variables in our business, but the metrics we can attribute directly to the IoT Development work are meaningful: session duration up, conversion rate up, error rate down, and our NPS for the digital touchpoint has improved by eleven points. Our account managers report that the new capability is coming up positively in client conversations.
What did you like most about working with this company?
Their instinct for keeping the business objective visible throughout technical decision-making. I have worked with technically excellent teams who lose the strategic thread as complexity increases. This team maintained a clear connection between every architectural choice and the outcome we had agreed to achieve. That orientation made the trade-off conversations significantly easier.
Would you recommend this company to others, and would you work with them again?
Yes, without reservation. I have already made two direct referrals within my Real Estate network — in both cases to peers facing IoT Development challenges similar to ours. I gave those referrals with confidence because I knew the experience I described was reproducible, not the result of exceptional circumstances on our engagement.
Hardware-to-cloud pipeline built by engineers who understood both worlds equally
Ciarán Murphy / CTO - Liffey Tech Solutions Ltd
Verified
Apr 07, 2024
Apr 07, 2024
Project summary: Our existing platform had grown organically over several years and the accumulated technical debt was beginning to affect both performance and our ability to ship new features.
Our previous agency had given us a platform that worked well enough to demo and fell apart under real load. This team came in, diagnosed the root causes accurately, and rebuilt the critical components without disrupting the live service. The performance improvements were immediate and measurable — page load times dropped by 60 percent, error rates dropped to near zero, and our support team has far fewer incidents to deal with. The contrast with our previous experience could not have been sharper.
PROS
Collaborative working style that made them feel like an extension of our team, excellent written communication for our async timezone relationship, clean and readable codebase
CONS
Time zone difference required some adjustment to our internal communication habits but the team managed the overlap window efficiently and it never affected momentum
Project TypeIoT Development
IndustryFood & Beverage
Project Cost$10,000 to $49,999
DurationSep 2025 – Nov 2025
Questions & Answers
Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.
Liffey Tech Solutions Ltd is a Food & Beverage business based in Dublin, Ireland. As CTO I am responsible for all technology investment decisions, vendor selection, and ensuring our digital capabilities match our growth ambitions. We operate in a competitive market where the quality of our software directly affects our ability to win and retain clients.
What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?
Our existing IoT Development capability had accumulated years of technical debt that was slowing every new feature to a crawl. Incident frequency was rising, developer confidence was falling, and we knew a rebuild was overdue. We needed a partner with the depth to do it properly rather than apply another layer of patches.
What services did the company provide for your project?
The full IoT Development lifecycle from discovery through to production deployment and hypercare support. This included requirements workshops, solution architecture, sprint-based development, QA and automated testing, deployment to our cloud environment, and a structured handover with documentation. They also provided a brief post-launch period of dedicated support which was genuinely useful.
Why did you choose this company over other providers you considered?
Honestly, the quality of the questions they asked during the briefing process set them apart. Most vendors listen to the brief and come back with a solution to exactly what you described. This team came back with a solution to what we actually needed, which turned out to be somewhat different. That kind of consultative instinct is what we were looking for.
How clearly did the company understand your requirements and business goals?
Thorough and precise. They translated our business language into technical requirements without losing the intent, which is a skill that sounds straightforward but frequently goes wrong. Every user story they wrote was reviewed against the original business objective before it entered the sprint and the acceptance criteria were specific enough to remove subjectivity from QA.
How was your overall experience with their communication and project management?
Professional and efficient. We used a shared project management tool that gave our stakeholders visibility without requiring them to attend every meeting. The project manager had a clear escalation path and used it appropriately. The only time I needed to intervene directly was when I chose to, not because something had been missed.
Did the company deliver the project on time and within your expected budget?
Yes on both counts. There was one sprint where a third-party integration took longer than scoped because of undocumented API behaviour on the vendor side. The team flagged it immediately, proposed two mitigation options, and we agreed on an approach that recovered the timeline within two weeks. That is how scope issues should be handled and rarely are.
What tangible results or business impact have you seen since the project was completed?
The most direct measure is that the problem we hired them to solve no longer exists. Beyond that, the new IoT Development platform has reduced our operational overhead measurably, our team spends less time managing incidents and more time on product development, and we have been able to onboard two new enterprise clients who had previously cited our technical limitations as a barrier.
What did you like most about working with this company?
The post-launch behaviour. Some agencies disappear the moment the final invoice is paid. This team maintained the same level of responsiveness during the hypercare period as during development, handed over thorough documentation without being asked twice, and checked in proactively a month after go-live to review performance metrics with us. That last part was entirely unprompted.
Would you recommend this company to others, and would you work with them again?
Yes. The referral I would give comes with context: they are not the cheapest option and they are not the fastest to schedule. If you are optimising purely on price or looking for someone to start tomorrow, there are other choices. If you want the work done properly and a partner you can trust with a complex, high-stakes IoT Development engagement, this team is the answer.
Results that made the business case look conservative in hindsight
Kenji Watanabe / General Manager, IT - Tokai Digital KK
Verified
Jan 02, 2024
Jan 02, 2024
Project summary: The project had both a hard delivery date tied to a board commitment and a scope that our previous agency had told us was not achievable. We needed someone to prove otherwise.
Our previous agency had given us a platform that worked well enough to demo and fell apart under real load. This team came in, diagnosed the root causes accurately, and rebuilt the critical components without disrupting the live service. The performance improvements were immediate and measurable — page load times dropped by 60 percent, error rates dropped to near zero, and our support team has far fewer incidents to deal with. The contrast with our previous experience could not have been sharper.
PROS
Business-aware approach to every technical decision, strong project governance, fast turnaround on feedback, zero drama during a genuinely complex engagement
CONS
We underestimated the internal resource commitment required on our side during discovery — the team warned us, we did not listen fully, and the first sprint was slower as a result
Project TypeLow-Code / No-Code Development
IndustryConstruction
Project Cost$50,000 to $149,999
DurationSep 2025 – Feb 2026
Questions & Answers
Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.
As General Manager, IT at Tokai Digital KK, I manage a cross-functional technology team serving our Construction clients from Tokyo, Japan. We are a commercially focused organisation and every technology decision we make is evaluated against a clear business case. We needed a partner who understood that context, not just the technical brief.
What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?
Our Construction regulatory environment had changed and the compliance timeline was non-negotiable. We needed to rebuild specific components of our system to meet the new requirements and our internal team was already fully committed to the core product roadmap. Bringing in a specialist Low-Code / No-Code Development partner was the only realistic path.
What services did the company provide for your project?
The core engagement was Low-Code / No-Code Development but expanded to include technical consultancy during the discovery phase, which helped us refine the requirements significantly before development began. They also took responsibility for coordinating with our third-party data providers, which removed a significant coordination burden from our internal team.
Why did you choose this company over other providers you considered?
Their portfolio included two projects that were sufficiently close to our own brief in terms of complexity, Low-Code / No-Code Development scope, and Construction context that we felt confident they understood what we were asking. The proposal was technically rigorous, the pricing was transparent, and the proposed team structure gave us senior engineers throughout rather than just for the pitch.
How clearly did the company understand your requirements and business goals?
Extremely well. They asked detailed questions, challenged vague requirements until they were specific, and proposed sensible defaults for decisions we had not yet made rather than just leaving them open. By the time development started there was no ambiguity in the backlog, which is a rare starting position.
How was your overall experience with their communication and project management?
The project management was the best I have experienced in a vendor relationship. We had fortnightly sprint reviews with structured agendas, a shared backlog that we could inspect at any point, a risk register that was actively maintained rather than created at kickoff and never opened again, and a project manager who treated our time as something worth protecting. Communication was proactive, not reactive.
Did the company deliver the project on time and within your expected budget?
On time and within the agreed budget. They had given us a range estimate at the start, which I had been sceptical of, and they landed within the lower half of that range. Their estimation accuracy came from having broken the work down in genuine detail during discovery rather than giving a rough number and hoping. It showed in every sprint.
What tangible results or business impact have you seen since the project was completed?
Quantitatively: user engagement metrics are up significantly since launch, our support ticket volume has dropped, and we have received unsolicited positive feedback from clients who noticed the improvement. Qualitatively: our internal team is proud of the product we now have, which affects morale and retention in ways that do not show up on a dashboard but matter enormously.
What did you like most about working with this company?
Their ability to hold the business objective in mind alongside the technical task. I have worked with technically excellent agencies who lost the thread of what we were actually trying to achieve. This team never did. Every architectural decision, every trade-off conversation, every prioritisation discussion was anchored to the outcome we had agreed at the start.
Would you recommend this company to others, and would you work with them again?
Yes, without qualification. I have already made two direct referrals to peers in the Construction sector who were facing similar Low-Code / No-Code Development challenges. In both cases I gave the recommendation specifically because I was confident the experience would match what I described — which is a level of confidence I do not extend lightly.
Company Info
Founded
2010
Employees
10 - 49
Hourly Rate
$100 - $149
Client Rating
4.3/5 (11 reviews)