Ottawa based Pythian is a remote database administration company that works around the clock. Although the firm deals with its clients during normal business hours, its staff needs to be ready to take on any business issues that may arise at all hours of the night. Paul Vallée, a co-founder of the company realized that it was getting difficult to get his employees to work at odd hours in order to give his customers the highest quality service. In order to ease the stress, Vallée few out to Hyderabad, India. He set up an office in the country in 2002 because it had the expertise and also the geographic based timing to support clients while the Canadian workforce was at home for the evening.
The local remote database administration services company was working around the clock to fix and maintain its customers’ data. Its engineers needed to collaborate with clients during business hours, but also service databases during the night.
Vallée says, “The whole idea of setting up a subsidiary in India for a 20-person company was ridiculous. I didn’t know that I couldn’t do it because nobody told me that I couldn’t do it.” However, this did not stop him and he pushed ahead with his plans. Pretty soon he also had employees based in Australia working on the North American evening shift. With 15 years of business under its belt, Pythian is a truly global company now with 215 employees working in 21 countries across the globe.
The interesting thing about the company’s setup is that even though it has a presence in a number of countries it actually does not have any clients there. The firm has accessed the international market for talent and not more business, as is usually the case. Vallée explains that, “We can hire out of a candidate pool that is global instead of limiting ourselves to a pool that happens to be living where we have offices.”
The nature of Pythian’s business required it to develop a software that logged all its employees actions so that customers could be provided with a detailed report of what they were paying for. Luckily, the same software allowed the company to manage its global team because its logged all the actions of remote employees. The system is very detailed and asks workers to document “observations, actions and results.” All tasks are timed and reporting can be filtered and searched in numerous ways. This has made managing the global team pretty straight forward for the Pythian team and a major advantage for the firm.
Vallée says there are still some issues that their global presence cannot resolve by stating that, “We’ve come a long way in telepresence technology to create collaboration. But if they’re asleep or would rather be having dinner with their families – this is a very tough challenge.”
Source: Ottawa Business Journal
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