Jalasoft

I am the Director of Technology of FSI

FSI provides CMMS software for hospitals and health care systems.

Prior work

2-5 Employees

We were in need of additional developers and testers for our Engineering team to be involved in both maintenance, bug-fix, and new development efforts.

We accelerated implementation of our product roadmap initiatives through the additional capacity having Jalasoft teammates provided.

Jalasoft developers are tightly integrated with our Engineering team, participating in all our sprint meetings and planning sessions.

In-Person Meeting

Jalasoft has a demonstrated track record of high standards for their engineers. They were able to ramp up with our code base and process very quickly, and established trust with our team within months. We have a strong account management relationship with Jalasoft, and they have been very responsive to our requests for additional skills or developers as our needs have changed.

There have occasionally been delays in receiving candidates due to their staffing process. However, the quality of candidates remains very high.

I’m the VP of product development at Jaggaer, a SaaS e-procurement provider.

We needed software engineers and QA resources.

Jalasoft has augmented our team with software engineers, primarily in Java, although we also have a very small contingent of PHP developers. Jalasoft also provides functional QA, manual testing efforts, automated QA, and performance testing.

We have around 65 people from Jalasoft assigned to our project.

Several years ago, our company was acquired by a private equity firm that had done business with Jalasoft previously and recommended that we consider using Jalasoft as a replacement for our existing outsourcing provider.

We have about a $2.5 million investment annually with Jalasoft.

We started working together in September 2018, and the engagement is ongoing.

Jalasoft's quality work has definitely helped us cut costs for engineers and QAs, at least compared to the cost of hiring US-based engineers. One of the things I really like about Jalasoft is that they actually act as an augmentation to our onshore team on a long-term basis. Jalasoft’s engineers have built up subject matter expertise on both the problem domain and the technical domain.

Jalasoft delivers work on time and on budget. Like any other employee, they are expected to deliver their user stories or features on time as part of that major release. Jalasoft does just as well as their onshore counterparts in delivering those features on the timelines they promised. They’ve done a great job of estimating the work and delivering it reasonably close to their estimates.

We sometimes have challenges with communication. English is a second language to many of Jalasoft’s employees, and they do a really good job of screening and ensuring that employees have at least a working knowledge of English. There are some times when we struggle a bit. It’s not any kind of show-stopping thing, and we’re able to work through it. If there’s an area of weakness, it’s the language barrier, but it's not a major problem.

Don’t treat Jalasoft as short-term hired guns. They work best when you immerse them in your existing teams and partner with them rather than hand them a turnkey project.

I'm the former VP of R&D for the nonprofit division at a software company.

We needed staff augmentation services. Our goal was to reduce costs and ramp-up time management that we needed to manage big teams.

Jalasoft provided staff augmentation services, mainly R&D resources. We had some developers in our local market and different locations around the US, and Jalasoft augmented those teams with developers from Bolivia, Mexico, and other places. Jalasoft helped us build a diverse nearshore team and also provided management for those people. Jalasoft was required to onboard new staff members before they were billable, so we didn’t have to build that service with our management team.Initially, Jalasoft worked on several projects. On each project, the team would bring in their top architect, engineer, or project manager to learn the product. We would provide training to that person just like we would to a new employee. Those people would then build their own onboarding program and learn more on their own.Jalasoft was able to streamline the onboarding process by creating onboarding techniques. The team had phased learning training calendars, and they recorded training and let teammates rewatch those recordings. Jalasoft intervened heavily after the recording and would train resources on newer things they hadn’t recorded yet. Jalasoft was comprehensive about getting the people up to speed. If a teammate didn't get up to speed in time, Jalasoft would replace them with somebody who could. We required developers with .NET programming skills. In the end, we had a new project that needed a completely different stack. We required professionals with knowledge in MySQL, LAMP stack, Python, and Ruby on Rails. Jalasoft was able to find people with these technology skills. Some of them developed courses for that and taught people that technology.

At one point, I had about 50 Jalasoft employees under me. If you added them all up, I probably had over 100 employees from Jalasoft work with me over the past 15 years.

We started working with Jalasoft 15 years ago. It was a direct referral from one of our board members. At the time, outsourcing was new and wasn’t like it is now, where you go to the cheapest job market. Jalasoft was a capable organization that could provide significant cost savings and help us in many areas.

We spent around $1–$2 million yearly. Overall, we spent well over $10 million.

We worked together from June 2011–April 2025.

Jalasoft helped us save time and reduce costs. The team's work met my expectations.At first, I wasn’t sure about Bolivian developers and their quality of work, but they could do the job. Jalasoft was consistent and tried hard on everything. If they weren’t cutting it, the manager would pull them out and put them somewhere else. Sometimes people weren’t cut out to work at Jalasoft, so they would let them go. After I got to a point where I trusted Jalasoft, I didn’t have to monitor teammates constantly; they did it for me.

Jalasoft delivered the work on time and on budget. Projects didn’t always come out on time, but it wasn’t the workers' fault. It was more the management team. We were kind of pushed to say we would get something done before we could get it done. The R&D team would do what we told them to do, but they would also bring up concerns.In the end, the work that was done was still on time, which was what management had expected. The R&D team would agree to it and then get it done in that amount of time. Most of the time, that was the case unless we had a scope increase.We communicated through Microsoft Outlook email and Microsoft Teams. We also used Azure DevOps, and Jalasoft was probably some of the best folks I had worked with who knew how to use it. We also used Jira in some of the newer projects.

Their communication at first wasn’t as good. They would give us folks who couldn’t speak English as well as we would hope, so it was hard to communicate with them. Jalasoft would bring in another person who could speak better, and they started making a different requirement for English speakers. They had to be fluent and able to articulate ideas in English. That became a problem over the first five years, but Jalasoft resolved it.After that, if they had English speakers or people who could barely speak English, they kept them in a technical role where they didn’t really need to speak too much directly to the folks. They started putting leads in charge of little groups, and those leads would speak for that group. They would also own that group’s metrics and any other things we needed them to account for.Another weakness was the pricing area. They raised the prices every year, and it was a big surprise. In the end, when we were trying to save big costs, that became a pain point. I’m sure it was a pain point on their end, too, because they had rising costs, and we weren’t willing to go up on costs. That was probably always going to be a problem with any organization.

Know your requirements and how long you want them to augment your staff. If you want them to augment your staff as a permanent fixture of your team, or if you need a finite project with a start and an end date that is very specific. If you can define your project with a definite start and end date, you can probably be very successful.Be ready to execute on that model. If you go with the no-end-date model, at least give it some timeframe. I would also recommend that you trust but verify. You might want to trust Jalasoft, but you may want to verify that they’re getting you the results that you need.

We help school administrators rise to the challenges of today while building the foundation for a better tomorrow. Improving efficiency, optimizing performance, and managing compliance through our suite of administrative, financial, and nutritional solutions.

We needed help with automation building and testing.

Jalasoft originally joined to help us build automation for our company from scratch. First, they came in and quickly learned about our products to come up with a plan. Within two weeks, they started showing us results and explaining where we were headed towards.

QA engineers, testers, automation engineers, DevOps engineers, lead engineers, and a manager.

Recommendation

Late October 2020

Jalasoft has taken our team to the next level in efficiency, scalability, and professionalism. We’ve been able to merge our resources and work together as one team towards the same goals. Their team is great at communicating opportunities for improvement and any potential risks and blockers with ongoing projects. Jalasoft has also played a huge role in innovation for not only our team but that of others within our R&D departments.

Jalasoft performs very well. They’re always timely and even ahead of schedule; they’ve always exceeded our expectations. We’ve worked with them for a long time, and they’ve consistently shown up and done their work.

Jalasoft’s work ethic is impressive. Additionally, I’ve been really impressed with their quality of work, communication skills, and overall presentation.

No, they’re amazing.

Allow Jalasoft to innovate and listen to their ideas.

My role was Senior Director, Product Engineering. One of my responsibilities was to manage the Jalasoft contract. Another was to manage software teams that included embedded Jalasoft Engineers.

We needed python engineers, testers, automated testers, and React/Node stack UI engineers.

The contract was in place before I took over.

The staff augmentation project was continuous. Our environment was a large scale agile Product Engineering shop. When I left the project, we had over 60 Jalasoft team members on teams delivering working software to production. The Jalasoft team members were involved from design through production delivery and support.

Recruitment with Jalasoft is a world-class process. Due to their university system and their ability to train engineers in the technologies we need, is invaluable. Once a candidate has advanced through their system, they can also shadow teams and learn team nuances prior to joining. As a result, it is very rare for someone to join a team and not be a solid fit.

Attrition rates in tech have been a huge challenge the past few years. Jalasoft was not immune to this, however, their attrition rates were lower than our own.

Jalasoft team members were considered a full member of the team. Some expectations were slightly different due to their average experience being less than my team (primarily senior engineers). Design and architecture leadership were two areas we expected less in. Even then, there were some exceptional engineers who had these capabilities too.

While I managed the contract, we had rates that I could brag about, alongside delivery and performance results that outpaced those rates, consistently. Their management support was strong and were invaluable to me in my role. Rate conversations felt more like a partnership than the typically painful talks we have all had with vendors.

Proactive cybersecurity reports would build confidence. What has been done, what’s being improved and what future steps are planned.