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          Recent Achievements

          CROZ DACH: Hello Germany!

          In 2022 CROZ established its presence in the German speaking market. CROZ DACH GmbH founded in March developed greatly last year. While working with clients in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland (DACH) for over a decade, CROZ had no local office in this market until 2022. Founding CROZ DACH GmbH in March based in Munich was the logical next step. A lot was achieved in this time. In just 10 months, we have acquired many great new clients in DACH:

          • Top-3 Austrian Public IT provider
          • Top-3 German Bank
          • Top-3 German Insurance
          • Top-3 German Software Company
          • Top-3 German Transport and Logistics
          • Top-3 German Public Finance Institution
          • Top-3 Swiss Bank
          • Heavy Industry in Germany
          • Several Startups
          • Small and Mid-sized IT providers

          You can check CROZ DACH page here: www.dach.croz.net Additionally, CROZ DACH GmbH became first tier supplier for Red Hat Professional Services in DACH and CEE, IBM Germany, and IBM Switzerland, providing our partners with skilled and experienced teams and in some cases individuals to make their clients succeed. The teams in Munich and Croatia enjoy working together, complementing their experiences, and we have a lot of fun and professional satisfaction every day. For our clients the different organizational parts of CROZ work like ONE agile, fast and dedicated European team.

          Croz dach office

          In our 500 square meter office located in the eastern quarter of Munich called Giesing, our German employees found a home to collaborate, work and meet with clients and partners. With a 5+5 years rental contract in a modern office building featuring a nice cantina and 31.000 square meters, there is room to grow for the coming years. While we’re allowing for a modern way of work in a hybrid style from home, being mobile, at clients or in our office, the Munich facility has immediately gained very high levels of use both from our local team and from our Croatian colleagues.

          With our clients in DACH we’re already tackling an impressive range of IT topics and technologies that are both highly relevant in the market and exciting:

          • AI, AI in the cloud, Data in the hybrid cloud, MLOps
          • Cloud Transformation to hybrid and multi public cloud
          • Development/ Modernization of custom applications with Java/TypeScript
          • DevOps for hybrid Cloud and IBM Mainframe environments, GitOps
          • Integration, API management and event-based architecture with Kafka, 3Scale and IBM API Connect
          • Mainframe modernization and replacement of Tools
          • Red Hat OpenShift and Automation with Ansible plus SSO
          • Agile definition of digital products

          After just a few months this DACH engagements already covered all our clusters of expertise at CROZ: Agile, Data and AI, DevOps, Integration, Security, and the IBM Z Mainframe. Now German language is an important factor for many of our clients in DACH, even if they are multi- national organizations themselves. Therefore, we have built our local team to deliver native language ability combined with several key skills to be part of our client engagements:

          • Business Analyst
          • Software Architect
          • IBM Mainframe Architect
          • IT Governance and ISM Consultant with deep skill in German Regulation
          • Industry Expert for Banking and Insurance in DACH
          • IT Service Delivery Expert
          • Multi-Project Manager
          • Private and public IT Service and Procurements contracts in Germany

          This list of experiences will grow as we plan to surpass 20 employees in Germany in 2023. Combined with a legal entity in Germany our customer’s journey in partnering with CROZ to boost their digital and IT endeavors is now greatly facilitated. Our client and partner feedback in DACH is excellent and we’re determined to keep it so. If you’re curious to learn how we can help you, our DACH managing directors Vedrana Miholić, Peter Blenninger and Joachim Gucker are eager to listen and ready for You. We are yours, just a click on LinkedIn away. Please feel very welcome!

          peter blenninger image

          The value for the customer that digital extensions of traditional products can create determines the future economic success of a company. A company that wants to be successful in the age of digital must therefore either become a software company or it needs a strong IT partner. Inflation, war, depression: Don’t save in the wrong place. With each crisis of the last 15 years, the gap has widened between us in Europe and the countries and companies that have continued to invest strategically in digital.

          IT has long since ceased to be a cost factor and has become the backbone of all digital business models. This is exactly why now is the time to actively use AI and machine learning and modernize your own IT. Because never again will change happen as slowly as it does today.

          — Peter Blenninger, Co-Founder and MD of CROZ DACH

          CROZ AI: A year of innovation and growth

          Yup, it’s hard to believe that it’s been a whole year since the company was founded. Looking back, we can say it’s been an exciting year for CROZ AI – a subsidiary created to help clients find opportunities where machine learning makes sense and build machine learning based software solutions. We see a trend in the market, with clients who are moving more and more from just testing to using ML products in production. With different flavours of AI being more capable every day, it’s obvious that the trend will continue. This is also evident when you look at the growth of our CROZ AI team which now consists of multiple clusters of amazing and talented people. It has been a busy year, to say the least.

          AI

          It started with building of a custom AIOPS platform for HT, the largest telecommunications company in Croatia. During the project, we upgraded the current monitoring solution to significantly reduce downtime by moving from a traditional reactive model to a proactive and predictive model. Later in the year, we increased our focus to the financial industry, where CROZ AI expanded its partnership with Nexi CEE, Europe’s largest PayTech company. The team supported Nexi in testing a novel fraud detection model. Within the test period, we detected 380% more fraudulent transactions with 25% fewer false positives. Throughout the year, the team found that more and more clients were looking for a platform that would help them connect different use cases within their organization so they could quickly bring these solutions into production and maintain them in the future.

          CROZ AI implemented a complete system for the anonymization of text documents on the cloud platform Databricks to help our german client comply with strict GDPR.

          This system not only provided custom ML models for anonymization, but also helped the client to annotate data, automate model training, and implement many of MLOPS’ best practices. Overall, it was a successful and impactful year for CROZ AI, which looks forward to continuing to help clients find and develop innovative machine learning solutions in the years to come.

          In just one year, we’ve discovered the vast potential of machine learning in various contexts, while understanding the crucial role of MLOps in ensuring governance and automation in ML operations. This balance has been vital in driving innovation, collaboration, and ultimately delivering meaningful impact across industries.
          Here’s to many more successful years to come!

          — Damir Kopljar, AI Team Lead at CROZ AI

          News is out: We launched a Business Studio!

          Do you know what became crucial? Embedding customer focus and innovation in everything we do. Whether those customers are our dear colleagues or the nice people who use our digital products. Without reviewing and meeting the real needs, whether you are creating something new or just redesigning the current setup, aligning the existing critical pains and defining the tasks to be done, what we do or create is indeed only partially done. Therefore, incorporating product and creative thinking into everyday business is a must for all ambitious companies and a solid foundation for any kind of business resilience, sustainability and growth expectations. Not to mention the huge impact it has on strategic direction, corporate culture and brand image. Aaaaaand that’s exactly why we created CROZ Studio!

          Wondering what it’s all about?

          CROZ Studio is our business studio that specializes in helping people who are considering doing any of the following:

          • building and innovative service, product, business or venture
          • developing a strategy, optimizing processes and finding flow in what they do
          • any kind of change, either organizational or technological, to improve the way they work

          Our goal? Simply making your biggest challenges ours from the very start!> We bring together the right way of working and this way of thinking by developing digital business solutions for different industries. And we don’t just do it through coaching or consulting. We do it by building them together, with our own skin in the game.

          The key fundamentals we bring to your business are purpose, innovation, collaboration, focus, data orientation, and success metrics.

          And yes, we take it to the next level of process methodology and modern technology. Whether it’s a complex business or a fast-growing startup, you are most likely in a state of exploring and exploiting growth with the goal of your business thriving in the digital age. Bringing visibility and transparency to your portfolio of initiatives and delivery activities will put you on the path to continuous improvement by reinventing your processes, operations, and business models to be hard to disrupt. Resilient companies are hard to knock down. Whatever the competition or the market throws at them, they will adapt the way they operate to keep the value flowing. As Jonathan Smart says, resilient companies deliver better value to their clients, sooner, in a safer way, and with happier employees. Because no two organizations are alike, there is no best practice, no recipe with certain predefined steps that, when followed in the right order, will produce the same results in every organization. However, there are organizational and technical patterns that have proven beneficial in certain situations. The best results are achieved with the right combination of situational awareness, patterns, guidance, circumstances, involvement and commitment, considering the specific organizational context. If this sounds like your cup of tea, check out the offering and feel free to reach out to the CROZ Studio ambassadors Luka Gauta, Ivan Krnić, and Davor Čengija. Let’s start building outstanding businesses that last – together!

          Image of people talking

          Presenting you a virtual team guardian: kustodian_

          Do your new hires spend their first couple of weeks reading project documentation while waiting to receive all needed permissions to start working? Do you spend more time doing administrational stuff, rather then working on your teams personal and professional growth? Wouldn’t it be easier to have one source of truth for all dev tool stack portfolio permission management? These are just some of the questions we thought about while creating kustodian_. Also, if you answered to any of those questions with „duh“, „obviously“ or „yeah, tell me something new“ – keep reading, it gets more interesting!

          How it all started?

          You might be familiar with this situation: a company grows and the number of its employees’ increases, managing teams becomes more challenging as the amount of repetitive management tasks required grows exponentially. This takes the team leads’ focus away from the heart of their team – the people. At the same time, members of the team, both old and new, spend more time waiting and being uncertain of their role within the team. Problems such as these appeared in CROZ as well, and for a long time, we tried to come up with a way to solve them.

          After many days spent brainstorming, participating in product discovery workshops, and a whole lot of coding, the solution appeared in the form of kustodian_ – the first product to come out of the CROZ factory. You can think of Kustodian as your virtual team guardian, always ready to take on all the tedious team management tasks, leaving you free to focus on what matters – the people in your team.

          Why is it so awesome?

          kustodian_ combines automatic permission management for all your resources with a one-click onboarding process for new hires. When a new employee arrives, they’re just a few kustodian_ clicks away from immediately getting to work. If they leave or change teams, kustodian_ allows you to effortlessly reassign or remove their permissions. It also acts as a central hub for team management, providing information on the roles, skills, and current project assignments of every team member. This helps every employee understand their position and role in the team and the company as a whole. Furthermore, team leads can easily track the progress and personal growth of every team member as all the information is available in the same place.

          kustodian_ was initially introduced to several teams within CROZ and the initial feedback was overwhelmingly positive. The few suggestions for improvement were quickly implemented in the new releases, and as of recently, Kustodian is an integral part of our internal processes. Our next aim is to introduce other companies to the many benefits it brings!

          — Milan Jovanović, Team lead and Technical product manager @kustodian_

          What did we learn thanks to kustodian_?

          As the first commercial product made by CROZ, kustodian_ taught us about many skills, methods, and tools used in product development. But the most important lesson learned came from the same source as the inspiration for kustodian_ – people. We included our whole team alongside many other people in CROZ in all parts of the product development lifecycle. From developers and BA’s to marketing specialists and HR, everyone took part in creating the best possible product, be it by suggesting a cool new feature or providing an interesting perspective we hadn’t considered before. This enabled us to build upon a vast amount of experience and fresh ideas, while simultaneously leading to a huge increase in the enthusiasm of everyone involved – everyone wanted the product to succeed as they were a part of its making. So our message to everyone undertaking the challenging task of product development is – you have people, use them! If we managed to spark your interest, take a look and feel free to reach out for a demo. CROZ and kustodian_ are eagerly awaiting your call!  

          7 things we (re)learned in 2022

          We will not lie – 2022 was demanding, but at the same time it was rewarding thanks to the many valuable lessons we learned through the work!

          1 Being resilient

          The last few years have been anything but predictable. Nevertheless, we have had a positive surprise: the CROZ family grew tremendously. And one of the new family members, CROZ DACH, has helped us bridge the gap between cultures. We have always been proud of the fact that we serve clients from all over the world, but setting up a new company in DACH in such a way that the new colleagues work in Munich and feel like members of the CROZ family at the same time was a challenge. A challenge that we have successfully mastered!

          2 Crossing the Chasm

          Speaking of the chasm: 2022 was a year in which we confirmed (yet again!) that Geoffrey Moore’s “Crossing the Chasm” continues to be a very relevant thinking tool for us. In the technology services business, our very existence depends to a large extent on how well we understand market dynamics along with the client’s sentiments towards specific technology hype. “The Chasm” is a filter we apply to every major strategic technology decision. And we have done that extensively in 2022 with all the new things we have added to our service portfolio. And with identities, too!

          3 New insights in the problem-solving industry

          For decades, we have been solving problems using technology. But there is always something new to learn to make this even better. For example, introducing our CROZ Studio offering and helping our clients to see more clearly the problems they need to solve – that was a game changer for us, too!

          4 It’s all about focus

          The past year has opened new perspectives thanks to new identities of the CROZ family – AI, DACH and CROZ Studio. We want them to grow and be sustainable in the process. That requires focus. But this new focus also allowed us to look at our mothership with different eyes and see the opportunities to find more comprehensive and better solutions to our customers challenges. A little distance and change have allowed us to overcome our preconceptions and make the right use of our new strengths.

          5 We really missed live meetings

          2022 brought back live meetings with clients! It’s one of the things we are most thankful for in 2022. Zoom and Teams are great, but nothing can replace the richness of a live conversation. You can feel the emotions, see the body language, and understand the dynamics of the conversation – all important aspects for a successful exchange of ideas. Thank you 2022 for bringing this back! We sincerely hope that live meetings will not disappear.

          6 Sharing is caring

          The luxury of live interactions applied to our interactions with the community as well! We have always appreciated the community and its value. But over the past years, we have focused on our internal knowledge sharing and student practices. So, we learned again that we need to give more to the community, and that’s how the idea of the Trailblazers meetup for senior dev talks was born.

          7 Helping others is important

          We love helping NGOs and institutions! Previously we did this through donations, but last year we found new ways to help! Our teams from the student apprenticeship developed an app that will help many NGOs in their daily work – especially to focus on their clients and spend less time on paperwork. But the cherry on top was the community service at the Inclusive Farm in Petrinja!