Planning for the worst since 2014 has made it alert and agile
Despite an invasion of its homeland, the destruction of its infrastructure and aggressive cyber warfare from Russia, Ukraine-founded Intellias Global has maintained 98% business continuity. It is now a multi-national telco services company but its foundations are very much in Ukraine, the country of its founders and one of the world’s most fertile hotbed of technology talent. It’s ability to grow rapidly and yet sacrifice none of its sensitivity and speed of reaction is exemplary to all telco service providers with pretentions to ‘agility’.
By necessity the company culture involved planning and preparing for the worst, which must tends to concentrate minds and make staff more efficient in peace times. “Our business continuity plan has been in place since 2014, when the conflict first began in the Donbas region, which is about 1000 km away from our office in Lviv,” said spokeswoman Anastasia Hibaieva, “from mid-2021 we invested a lot of resources to plan measures if fighting breaks out.”
Last year it grew by 70% and today it has 2500 employees in 11 global locations with delivery centres in Central and Eastern Europe (Poland, Ukraine, Croatia) and a presence in the US, Germany, UAE and Israel with further expansions planed in Europe, LATAM and APAC.
Ukraine is a technology hotbed because it has some of the world’s best technical universities. The Lviv Polytechnic National University, for example, was one of the first technical schools in Europe. There are many other motivated graduates emerging from institutes from Kharkiv to Kyiv. So the foundation of the company is in Ukraine.
However, despite the company successful explanation, complacency never set in and its staff maintained a collective survival instinct. On February 24, one hour after the first rockets were launched on Ukraine’s cities, Intellias declared emergency and began evacuating people and critical equipment from the affected cities.
Intellias applied preventive measures like setting up reserve power and network connections, align with an evacuation plan in place – “and more”. “We realised that this situation may evolve rapidly, so we started moving some of our equipment and people a couple of weeks before the attack began,” said Hibaieva. When it became clear that war was inevitable, Intellias launched the process of evacuating workers from dangerous region. For each individual employee, the evacuation took 1-2 days. “We organised everything in a way that we did not have significant interruptions in providing services. Customers understood these short disruptions, as employee safety is paramount,” said Hibaieva.
The majority of Intellias’s Ukrainian staff have been relocated to the western regions of the country and to the EU and continue working at Intellias. Over 1500 employees and their families are relocated to safe areas of Ukraine and abroad. Currently more than 20% of its employees are working from save areas around the globe, such as the Krakow office in Poland, which went from hosting 50 to 400 Intellias staff in weeks. This number is growing, as more employees are relocating. Another hundred employees moved to countries by themselves, mostly in the EU. “We are committed to the safety of our employees and their families in Ukraine offering support in many forms,” said Hibaieva, “our operations aren’t significantly disrupted and we can continue working as before.”
Intellias’ technology mission is “breathing life into great ideas with the power of technology” for top tier enterprises and the Fortune 500 in the FinTech, T&M, Agriculture and Telco sectors, by expediting their digitisation.
If readers of Mobile Europe want to help Ukraine the best way is to buy something from a Ukrainian company, says Hibaieva. “Anything you can find, really, including doing business with Ukrainian organizations. This is the direct way to keep our economy moving.”