Tim Armitage and Derek Leaver visited the COINS development centre in St. Petersburg during early January in time for the Russian Orthodox Christmas celebrations. The operation was established 5 years ago to augment the UK and Australian development teams and during that period has grown in numbers and experience. The team of 17, now involved in the development and support of most of the COINS modules and also customer PDRs, boasts a number of PhD’s and one real rocket scientist! Each of the COINS application development teams e.g. Procurement, House Builders, Finance, Plant is made of UK and Russian based developers and so there is a constant interaction between them and close collaboration, via e-mail/voice/web-meeting and also through visits to each others locations.

Technical Director, Tim Armitage, comments ‘we began slowly by ‘out sourcing’ small discrete pieces of work in order to establish how well we could work with a remote development team, and to judge capabilities. The ability and enthusiasm of the team is excellent and they are now very much just an extension of the 20+ developers we have located in the UK.’