Articles

Athletes spend years training to sharpen their skills. Years of dedication, sweat and tears, hoping to get a spot on the podium.

Well, our developers are not that different. You can be sure that when it comes to IT, they are ready to enter the arena. Our own annual hackathon event gives room to our developers to show what they are made of; 33 teams, 199 participants from 3 different countries – ready for an intense sleepless 24hrs of IT athleticism.

Every year, a different challenge needs to be met, and it’s all about apps, software, innovations and challenges. This year, following the immense success of our last Open Source themed hackathon Hack9, we gave our Levi niners something they can’t get enough of: fundamental IT. Our teams composed of Levi niners and teams from our customers came together to triumph over our new challenge: Designing the same highly performant app.

Everyone got briefed just a moment before the kick-off. The difference this year? Everything took place in the cloud – a technology progressively taking a bigger place in our daily work. Teams chose their own cloud platform and were encouraged to utilize all the managed services that the cloud of their choice offers, to cut down cost and the effort of implementation.

There was no jury this year. Every app was auto tested and its performance was displayed live on a big screen. The teams were evaluated on the functionality of their app, its performance, its cost efficiency and the team member’s ability to work with colleagues that they haven’t worked with so far. We sure love to get someone out of his or her comfort zone to explore new skills. On a practical standpoint, the skills we learned will definitely help every Levi niner thrive on an everyday basis. Yes, we like to learn a thing or two.

Events like this one, aside from celebrating our company culture and helping us to bring innovative ideas to life, allow our Levi niners to sharpen skills that we use regularly in our daily jobs and to enable our customers in their challenges.

It’s not about the prize, it’s about the pride. After an intense 24h event, it was time for some sleep. But you can be sure that we are already looking forward to the next Hack9 edition! Levi9 organizes several interesting events throughout the year, aimed to share insights and inspire. Check out our events page to find out about our upcoming events and to sign up https://stagingwww.levi9.com/events/.

It’s been 15 years since we started this, with a dream to create a truly unique company that would change the IT landscape like the comet Schumacher Levy9 changed space.

We kept on moving forward, looking straight ahead, always trying to be one step ahead. And here we stand today, stronger than ever, still working on the basis of our DNA and culture instead of KPI’s. We just welcomed our 999th team member and we felt it was the perfect occasion for us to look back at what we accomplished and, most of all, think about the path that lies ahead of us.

No better timing for our 2nd edition of Tech Doc Festival. Big-scale events in Belgrade Serbia, Kiev Ukraine and Iasi Romania. At unique locations, like one of the most beautiful theatres in the world, we invited all 999 levi niners plus invitee to expand their horizons and ponder on the way technology will change in the next 999 years. To give them a bit of inspiration, we curated though-provoking documentaries exploring technologies that are about to change society. From artificial intelligence to life-extension, from nanorobotics to extra-terrestrial encounters. The future remains a mystery, but we feel it is important to take the time to think about how our current actions can impact the next centuries.

While this event stands as a milestone of our achievements and a celebration of our rich community of 999 levi niners, the theme of this year’s Tech Doc Festival serves as a great allegory for the way we approach work at Levi9. It was always paramount for us to give our team the room to think outside the box, to expose themselves to new ideas and a better way of working. We feel it is the only way to keep thriving through the new challenges and to take advantages of the opportunities ahead. Our team members know they are part of a big family at Levi9 and that they will always be encouraged to think for themselves, to figure out the best way to provide solutions for our customers.

This is what we want to know, our customers’ needs, but most importantly, what they want to achieve. Where will be the next Tech Doc Festival? A beach in the Balkans? In a forest weekend getaway? We don’t know. Future will tell. One thing we can be sure of: a growing family of levi niners will be there to celebrate with us!

For pictures of this amazing event, click here!

Cybersecurity is not a sexy subject. It’s a lot of risk assessment, a thousand rules about what you can and can’t do – not exactly the first thing you want to tackle when you are building a business.

That said, it is important today more than ever to protect your assets and make sure your defence is up – this is why we made it simple. We have three groups of experts : A risk and compliance team; a blue team that builds up walls around your systems to protect your data; a red team that tries to penetrate your defences and makes sure your protections are impervious to attack. They are Levi9’s specialists when it comes to cyber self-defence and they have you covered when it comes to ensuring your system’s safety – but we don’t stop there.

Since cybersecurity is everybody’s concern, we found a way to teach our developers about the best ways to protect themselves and our customers from security attacks. Because an attack on our customers is an attack on us, and we don’t take that kindly.

We came up with games, contests and workshops to get our team acquainted with the cybersecurity rulebook. Secure9 takes place during the whole month of October, where our team will be welcomed to security attack simulations, social experiments, trivia nights and crash courses with our security specialists. We let them try their hand at hacking themselves, just so they realize how easy it can be. We even try to send them phishing e-mails to make sure they stay on their toes!

Everybody from the team got really excited about the Secure9 event and is much more sensitized to the importance of cybersecurity, now that they’ve experienced attacks firsthand. Now they have tools to protect themselves at home, but also a keen eye to assess risks and analyze if our customer’s system is ready to put up a fight. Much more interesting than reading through a thick rulebook.

What that means is that we’ll always be striving to promote the best practices when it come to security and always go the extra mile to ensure your company if safe. From customized training for your team to developing unique system architecture with the most optimized defences for your needs.

Seeing the immense success Secure9 had with our team, we are planning to extend the invitation to our customers next year. You too can learn a trick or two!

Tatyana van Witzenburg Security Officer

You won’t see Levi9 chase after new customers. Neither will you see us selling our services on TV or handing out flyers in the street – certainly not considering Dutch weather. We do not feel advertising and agressive sales is the path we want to take. We’d rather invest all our energy providing the best service to our customers and make sure they only have good things to say about us. By doing that, our customers become our ambassadors; they’ll tell their network about us, they might even take us along when they change company.

That’s how we grow – through quality relationships and striving to give our customers the best IT services they could get.

What do we do different? We ask questions. How are you doing? How’s the family? (We are very friendly indeed) But mostly, we take time to sit down and ask our customers about their company and their goals. We need to know how their business is doing, who are their competitors, what is their market, when do they plan to expand, why do they need us?

I personally always take the time to sit down with our customers and make sure to ask questions relevant to their situation. By understanding the way they see the market and their vision for the future, we often offer solutions that our customers didn’t consider yet. This allows us to come up with technical and organizational improvements and make sure they really serve our customer’s agenda. We don’t deliver standard software, we want to make sure you end up with software, which is beneficial for our customers and their end users.

To find a company that focuses a lot on close customer relations and is so keen on having face to face meetings is rare nowadays. But it’s only through getting to know our customers inside out that we can offer them services that will help them grow. Also, by understanding the journey they are about to take and validating a plan of action with them, we make sure we are on the same page when it comes to supporting their endeavours.

These interviews and workshops we have with our customers’ team are our best tools to bring impactful improvement to their businesses. So let’s sit down for coffee?

Debby Jansen CCO