Software engineering focuses its efforts on consolidating its business areas before making the leap to new markets

Netaphora‘s software developments are gaining considerable acceptance in the market, which has led this Bilbao-based engineering created in 2013 to have a wide portfolio of clients that includes both SME’s and public entities. The success obtained in its first years of life has not tempted its promoters to seek accelerated growth through the incorporation of large investors and the leap to the international market; on the contrary, they have chosen as first step to consolidate their three business areas in the domestic market.

Netaphora was born at the initiative of three employees of another Basque engineering company in the information and communication technologies sector, Nextel. “We covered our initial stage within Nextel – says Sergio Mugarza, one of Netaphora’s promoters – as an intrapreneurship initiative based on many years of experience in software development and a relevant client portfolio. Little by little, we untangled ourselves from the general strategy of our parent company till it arrived the moment when we decided to establish ourselves as an independent company. In that initial stage, as an innovative company, we received support from Beaz and we had to establish specific services within the field of software engineering that we were going to provide to customers”.

Business areas

The three business areas, which share the company’s billing volume almost equally, are the web area, the area of management software for selection processes in public administrations (public offers of employment) and the SIS database area, an own product that can be defined as an “online” database. In each of them, Netaphora is on a successful path.

The services of the web area have the engineering part as the strongest point, that is, the construction and the security of the web. For this, preventive and reactive security audits are carried out by the best professionals; at the same time, a professional result in the integration of free software is guaranteed.

On the other hand, the management software for the employee platform and the public employment processes allows the administration to manage in tailored way the personnel selection processes that it undertakes.

Likewise, the SIS database own product, in whose promotion Seed Capital Bizkaia has participated, is aimed at managing data in large organizations and allows users to design forms or data collection models, monitoring the information included in those questionnaires.

“We do not forget”, says Mugarza, “that the management of the company has a short, medium and long term perspective and each one of our business areas correspond to each one of those perspectives. Thus, the projects of the web area are short-term projects in order to obtain short-term incomes; the projects of the area of management software for selection processes in public administrations (public offers of employment) have a different cost, because the sales processes have a different maturation period, while in the case of the SIS product, the return is longer term. That is Netaphora, a good alternative with a good balance”.

Consolidation

Looking to the future, Netaphora’s promoter team is aware of having the capacity to achieve a high degree of growth, mainly thanks to the potential of its SIS database product to become a global platform, now consolidating the local business. “We are not addressing the internationalization process neither we have knocked on the doors of institutions to undertake it. First, we want to consolidate our business at the local level and trace the routes we are taking before making a leap to international markets, which will require future investments. Let’s go, little by little, with a safe step”.