IT Labs 14th Anniversary
Happy 14th IT LABS anniversary! We welcomed the spring with a Hawaiian themed party and cocktails. As an addition, We celebrated 10 year anniversaries and we raised our glasses for Angela Trenchevska and Erin Traeger, one of the first employees in IT Labs. Great parties need great pieces of art, and for that purpose, we had the first art exhibition of our colleague Aleksandra Koceva!
To many more years of success, loyalty, and friendship! Cheers!
Leadership Talks 3: How technical Leads are forged?
Leadership Talks 3rd session – done!
Thanks to Blagoj Janev we had an amazing time during the presentation and the photos cannot lie!
What did we learn? We discovered that every engineer should own essential traits and predispositions to become a technical lead. Luckily, some of these can be gained by experience, gained by working on a combined development of interpersonal and technical skills. Making mistakes is a process of learning, so we are encouraging you to stop being afraid and to start the self-improvement process.
Value Promotion : Engagement - Donating and planting trees at Skopje Zoo
This weekend in the spirit of our Company’s value Engagement we donated and planted 30 trees in the Skopje ZOO.
Wondering why? Because we care. We care about the environment, we love to help our city become greener and we enjoy educating the youngest among our families to be aware that the nature is the biggest long-term investment. We had an amazing time while working and we must emphasize that planting a tree is much easier while having fun! The trees besides improving the ZOO’s exterior, will provide shade and produce food for the resident-animals. We are thankful to our dear colleague Ana Blazhevska for giving us the chance for impact because Mother Earth matters to all of us.
Leadership Talks 2: Leaders are made, not born
Did you know that Behavioral Theories believe that people can become leaders through the process of teaching, learning, and observation?
Imagine that you recently discovered a road to an unbelievable location with breathtaking beauty and never-ending resources. If you walk along the road and you put up signs that can help others to find the way to the location you’ve found, you can consider yourselves a leader. But, how to make those “signs” clear and precise? Don’t panic, no one knows it by default, but everyone can learn it.
This March we had a remarkable presentation titled “LEADERS ARE MADE, NOT BORN” by Branislav Gjorcevski, our CEO. Although, only an hour is a short time to present and transfer the whole professional knowledge gained through years of experience, Bane did a great job and presented to the team the essentials of being a leader.
We learned that some traits are “must have” in leadership, but the awareness for developing them is one of the most crucial things.
We are impatient to hear what Blagoj (Our CTO) has to say next month in the next Leadership talks.
And remember “The only way to do great work, is to love what you do” – Steve Jobs … (and Bane) … or any great leader…
Value Promotion: Visiting Institute for the Rehabilitation of Children and Youth
Last May we visited the Institute for Rehabilitation of Children and Youth in Topansko Pole. This activity was organized by a team member, Voislav Mishevski, role model for the company’s value ‘Engagement’. In the spirit of Engagement, our team painted the sidewalks for the institute. We decided to spend some quality time with these wonderful people, share stories and laughs, and help them improve their living area. It was a creative, colorful and unforgettable experience that warmed our hearts and renewed our sense of responsibility. New friendships were forged while learning new songs to sing in celebration of life. Without a doubt, we will return…
Value Promotion: Loyalty – Volleyball and Beer @ Gradska Plazha
September 5. Our ‘Loyalty’ value role model Zlatko Atanasovski organized a beach volleyball tournament to promote ‘Loyalty’ as a strong company value. We randomly selected four amazing teams. The rest took to the stands and became fans and team cheerleaders. The teams played 2 semi-final matches, one for third place and the final match. We all had a ton of fun… and the winners earned their medals!
IT Labs Wellness Month – September
14th September was pronounced to be IT Labs’ Wellness Month. Here is the scoop:
- A health coach session at the office,
- A weekly challenge: “Get to work without a car”, and
- An excercise guide for working out at the office.
These were the components of this month’s wellness initiative. In the spirit of good health, we announced the addition of the new IT Labs wellness benefit package to motivate our team members to continue with self-care and embrace an active lifestyle.
“Nothing looks as good as healthy feels.” We want our employees to look and feel their best, so we’ll continue to grow this into a solid tradition.
Education Lab Event & Beer
Every now and then we have a beer (and not only beerJ) event at our office. We would be very delighted if you come and join us! Open invitation for all who would like to get to know us better.
But this is not only about beer, it is also about some IT stuff as well: coding, and development and headaches, and new projects, and new positions opening and lovely little tools that make our life better (or worse); it’s about the latest basketball match, the best coding twits and everything else that has caught our attention and is worth discussing.
We'll start with a short presentation from our employee and friend Aleksandra about her experience with IT Labs. Namely she has started as an intern here and has grown to a senior developer. It' a fun and exciting story and we hope you'll see yourself in this role as well. After this our PMO Slavjanka will be presenting the exciting opportunities for all of you with the IT Labs Education Lab. This is a new project we are starting for graduates and beginners. The gola is to provide each and every one a chance to grow from a beginner to an engineer in the software development industry. So if you're interested and prepared to invest your time (even earn some money), we're delighted to meet you on this Friday the 3rd of February 2017. The event starts at 3.30 pm, no end time defined.
We care about so many other things and we love meeting new people. So if you would like to know more about IT Labs, our company spirit, our Education Lab for graduates and students as well as the benefits of this Internship program we would be more than happy to have you as our guest at the next.
The most important goal for us is to have a good time and open up new horizons for all of you interested in developing good code.
Come and Join Us! Become our fiend and maybe we will have the chance to work together as well!
Promoted by:
Consulting Alliance: IT Labs disrupts the consultancy business
IT Labs is proud to announce the launch of Consulting Alliance, a new initiative expanding the IT Labs’ ecosystem.
The Alliance is an on-demand global network of highly skilled Consultants, who are Subject Matter Experts combining years of industry experience with a thirst for innovation and transformation. We integrate their industry-focused expertise with our cutting-edge technology infrastructure. The Alliance provides bidirectional relationships that increase revenue streams by broadening their services, products, and solutions.
Our objective is to apply expertise and insights to the biggest problems and opportunities facing businesses and governments worldwide.
In response to high demand from enterprises, in this initiative we are actively identifying and partnering with consultants across the globe. The goal: to create a network of best Subject Matter Experts ready to be engaged when significant or dynamic challenges emerge for clients.
To learn more or become a Consultant, please click here.
“We are embracing and empowering the strengths and innovation of small businesses and their teams in order to create a ‘large organization’ that is capable of providing elite service to the enterprise and governments on a global scale.” -Branislav (Banne) Gjorcevski, President of IT Labs.
Reach for The Clouds
You have big ideas to streamline your business and drive sales through the roof. But to get there, your ideas need business apps, and business apps have always been too expensive, especially in times like these.
Behind each one is a world of complexity, they need a data center with office space, power, cooling, bandwidth, networks, servers and storage, a complicated software stack, and a team of experts to install, configure and run them. You need development, testing, staging, production and failover environments. And when there’s a problem, good luck! You call technical support, and they don’t know what the problem is so they blame someone else. Oh, and when new versions are released, you want to upgrade but that might bring the whole system down.
Now, this is just for one app - when you multiply these headaches across dozens or hundreds of apps, it’s easy to see why the largest companies with the best IT departments aren’t getting the apps they need. And if they’re struggling, small businesses don’t even have a chance.
CLOUD COMPUTING IS A BETTER WAY TO RUN YOUR BUSINESS.
Instead of running your apps yourself, they run in a shared data center. You just plug in like a utility. This makes it quicker to get started and the cost is considerably less. It’s like Gmail compared to Microsoft Exchange.
Does Gmail require servers and storage? No
Do you need a technical team to keep Gmail up and running? No
Do you have to perform Gmail upgrades? No
When you use any app that runs in the cloud, you just log in, customize it, and start using it. That’s the power of cloud computing.
This model is so much better - it’s changing the way we think about software. Not just for consumer apps, business apps, as well. We call this Enterprise Cloud Computing.
Businesses are running all kinds of apps in the cloud these days, including custom-built apps. Why? Because you can be up and running in just a few days, which is unheard of with traditional business software. They cost less because you don’t need to pay for all the staff, products, and facilities to run them. And it turns out they are more scalable, secure, and reliable than the vast majority of apps out there.
This is why - they are based on an architecture referred to as “Multi-Tenancy”.
With a multi-tenant app, there aren’t multiple copies of the app for each business that’s using it, there’s just one app that everyone shares. But it’s flexible enough for everyone to customize for their specific needs. It’s like a giant office building where everyone shares the infrastructure and services, and each business can customize their own office space.
This mean that apps are elastic, they can scale up to tens of thousands of users or down to only a few.
Upgrades are taken care of for you - your apps get security and performance enhancements, and new features automatically. The way in which you pay for cloud apps is also different. Forget about buying servers and software - when your apps run in the cloud, you don’t buy anything at all. It’s all rolled up in a predictable monthly subscription, so you only pay for what you use.
Finally, cloud apps don’t eat up your valuable IT resources, so your CFO will love it! You can focus on projects that really impact your business, like deploying more apps.
Cloud computing is a simple idea but can have a huge impact on your bottom line.
Author:
Zharko Atkovski,
System and Network Administrator