While the ITC world is undergoing profound change, business owners from emerging and frontier markets like Romania, are silent dependable contributors to the next technological turn. Cluj-Napoca, 2^nd city of Romania and heart of Transylvania, is ought to become one of Europe’s stout tech landmarks.

Mr. Levente Szélyes, is currently the owner and CEO of Codespring, a Romanian software development and outsourcing company from Cluj-Napoca. He is one of these passionate software engineers who in the mid-90’s dared to have a different vision on how software development services could be deployed, at the time. Teaming up with skillful engineers was the cornerstone of his ITC entrepreneur journey. After setting up a software company in 1998, he entered a BOT (Build, Operate and Transfer) contract with the largest ITC company in Germany. Subsequently, Mr. Szélyes established the software house named Codespring. The little 1 million USD business, is carried by a team of 50 software engineers, providing creative input and technical expertise over the full software development life cycle, to US and European customers.

In order to give you a glimpse about the mindset behind the story, Mr. Szélyes shares his thoughts and intentions with a striking friendliness and authenticity.

1. What is your definition for an entrepreneur?

In my opinion, an entrepreneur is a person willing to embrace risk. Entrepreneurs are these individuals challenging the status quo and capable of tremendous innovation. Being an entrepreneur myself, it is clear that you have to have a certain mindset in order to follow your dreams and vision. An entrepreneur not only is investing in projects but is also aware of the risk of no return on investment. This draws quite a thick line between individuals who fail and those who prevail.

2. How did the business environment affect Codespring’s evolution?

At this point, we have evidence that business in Romania in growing at a healthy pace. We can emphasize on quality and R&D activities. Even if at European level prices per man-hour are slightly aligning, quality definitely makes a difference. Customers choose providers that are best complying their requests and are paying more attention to sophisticated details. They are checking teams, technology expertise, industry expertise and the way in which collaboration would run smoothly. For Codespring I think this is a tipping momentum as we have been working on turning our collaborations as flexible as possible on all levels.

3. You have quite nice success stories with your company. What is that matter most in your business relationships with your customers?

Mutual trust. If there is trust between the parties, we will be able to work together for more than 5 years. Our customers are content with our work and the team is providing a lot of added value: creativity, product development and independent work capability. I must also point out that I not speaking only about trust at business level but also at technical level: 99% of the colleagues understand the issues and solve them.

4. What do you understand by innovative resource allocation in your sector?

First, I would note that in the software development outsourcing the main asset are people involved in the projects. Next, from one project to another the teams are being reformed and the collaboration terms vary depending on customer preferences and specific. The innovation in resource allocation derives from the multiple and developing ways in which projects are being managed and delivered.

5. How does team size and composition impact on a software development project?

Size team has a great impact on the projects’ outcome. There are many theories on this subject. Personally I think that one should set the right balance between senior experts and junior professionals that need to gain hands-on experience. There some risks that must be managed and balanced with what can 100% work. As a rule: never use new teams for new projects.

6. What is Cluj Napoca’s proposition for the IT&C sector in 2013?

Cluj-Napoca has a great deal to offer for the IT&C sector in 2013. I would start with this exceptional pool of experienced professionals in almost all software development technologies.  Then, I must count all the traits that bring Cluj-Napoca closer to Europe: the cultural proximity, the strategic location and the openness for the new. The IT&C community is constantly delivering award winning projects and companies in the sector. Cluj-Napoca is growing as a top software development, software services and research center. On top of that, the price-quality ratio continues to be attractive for further investments.

7. What would be the key particularities of your business?

Codespring reveals itself as an evolving organism. The key traits for evolution are flexibility and solid foundation. The fine-tuning of all available resources, from both provider and customer side, set the foundation of mutual trust and long term partnerships. In addition, we strive to deliver creative input, technical expertise and passion over the full software development life cycle.

8. Plans for the future and ending words for our readers?

Since future is definitely a topic of my concern, in the next couple of years we aim at attracting more and more innovative projects. We are also continuing our investments in the research and development activities. Meanwhile, we shall focus on fine-tuning all our collaborations and processes that challenge us. As ending words: I encourage you to use our expertise for building powerful software so that you can focus on growing healthy businesses.