At Capmation, our mission is changing lives. But that wasn’t always the case. It took 20 years of hard work and varying business models to arrive at our true purpose.

Building a software company

When Capmation began, I envisioned building a successful software company. Think Adobe®…only bigger. I wanted to develop a suite of products that I could take to market and grow. I tried several startups—from point-of-sale software to healthcare scheduling. None of them got off the ground.

During this process I had a realization. While I enjoyed building software, I discovered what I enjoyed even more was working with the people who were building the software alongside me. Their passion was—and still is—contagious. I get energy and fulfillment from the constant collaboration.

A boutique consulting company

Eventually, Capmation was focusing less on launching our own software and more on helping other organizations tackle some of their toughest technology issues. We became a boutique consulting company and development team serving a select group of clients on mostly high-risk projects.

All around us, organizations had gone global with their development. Though off-shore rates seemed competitive, we kept hearing stories of pain points that made collaboration and execution difficult. Many experienced misunderstandings and missteps—often with no accountability.

Capmation set out to give our clients an alternative to on-shore or off-shore development—one that was cost-effective, eliminated time zone issues and language barriers, had a strong focus on collaboration and kept accountability at the forefront.

A new nearshore model

My search led me to Latin America and eventually to Quito, Ecuador. Quito offered several key benefits. The Latin American culture values transparency, hard work and constant learning, which translate to a work environment that aspires to honesty, reliability, problem solving and growth. The city’s universities lean into creativity and innovation—graduating highly skilled talent that’s proficient in all types of development. Lastly, Ecuador’s technology infrastructure supports high-speed processing and communications. This assures seamless collaboration between internal and external teams.

After conducting nearly three years of research, the Quito office opened in 2019. My original goal was to run a hybrid office with near-shore and on-shore developers. But once I began hiring nearshore software professionals, their talent and collaborative energy blew me away. The growth and success of the Quito team skyrocketed, so we sunsetted the hybrid model and ran all of our work out of Ecuador.

Off-hours development

Our new business model also included opening an office for off-hours development, QA testing and DevOps. We wanted a location with overlapping times zones so when the team in Quito finished up their work each day, the off-hours team could take it over and continue that work through the night.

After studying different locations, we settled on the island of Fiji, which offered a pool of technology talent as skilled and collaborative as our team in Quito. The office in Suva, Fiji, opened in 2021 and has been a huge success.

This year, we opened a third office in Dakar, Senegal, to extend our development operations and to serve African and European markets.

Expanding leadership

After we opened the Quito office, we quickly realized we needed to structure our business to support the intense growth we were experiencing. We brought on Dan McLean to lead sales and marketing and own business strategy. Dan helps us determine which markets and partners align best with our vision. We also brought on Jennifer Johnson to guide our evolution in the areas of operations and finance. Jennifer has an impressive track record for building world-class client and employee experiences through more efficient processes.

We also expanded the leadership of our global teams. Camila Mejia is our client-facing program manager in Quito and oversees our business analysts and project managers. Camila partners closely with several of our key technical leaders, Aaron Salazar and Rodrigo Arroyo as software engineering leads and Francisco Calderon as the driving force behind our OutSystems solution. Nesh Sami manages our QA function and leads our Fiji office.

Add our entire team of global technologists, and there’s nothing this talented group can’t do.

A new company mission

Throughout the last five years as we were building a global development team, I realized our mission for the company was changing. We were moving toward something bigger than just being a high-end software development and consulting company. It wasn’t until we invested time in strategic planning that we realized our mission was less about technology and more about changing people’s lives.

Capmation provides our global teams with opportunities and career paths they can fall in love with and—in the case of some of our team members—the ability to have a career and remain near their friends and families. In Fiji, for example, it’s very common for software engineers to have to leave the island to further their careers. Capmation changes lives by providing those opportunities.

Of course, that carries over to our clients. By offering them a new approach for software development, we’re changing their lives, too. Our unique 24/5, follow-the-sun development model offers clients the maximum value for their investment as well as faster development, testing and release times. And in the process, they’re building relationships with tight-knit groups of highly skilled and collaborative developers who focus on their best interest.

By investing in multi-disciplined global teams that build trusted and long-term business partnerships, we’re impacting communities and changing the lives of team members and clients in more meaningful ways.

And we’re just getting started.