Company news - Page 2

VirtusLab receives the Business Gazelles award, joining the prestigious group of Poland's fastest-growing SMEs. This year, VirtusLab achieved the top position in the Podkarpackie voivodeship. 

Awarded by "Puls Biznesu," the ranking highlights financial growth and transparency, with criteria based on turnover and profit growth over three years. VirtusLab celebrates this recognition with pride.

The Polish Company - International Champion competition promotes the activity of Polish companies on global markets. The competition aims to select and reward Polish enterprises that, thanks to foreign investments and export activity, transform into global entities, effectively compete on foreign markets and build Poland's brand in the international arena. The aim of the program is to share knowledge and experience in the field of foreign expansion.

The competition is open to all Polish enterprises which:

• within the last three years have made foreign investments - built a production plant, service center, distribution network outside Poland or took over a foreign company and/or
• carry out extensive export activities and are successful in foreign markets.

This year, as many as 146 companies entered the competition but only a few are honored. VirtusLab was honored in the Investor - Small and Medium Enterprises category. 

See the whole ranking here.

The program is conducted in cooperation with PwC, the Polish Investment and Trade Agency, PKO Bank Polski, the editorial office of "Puls Biznesu" and local self-government partners and the business environment.

A special shout-out to the whole #VLteam & congratulations to all other winners!

VirtusLab was founded as a company that focused on application-level development more than a decade ago. This was 2010 - a full decade and roughly 250 team members ago. Both VirtusLab and the world have changed significantly since then. Most importantly it became apparent that you cannot build large-scale, resilient and elastic systems relying exclusively on the application level expertise. Deep cloud infrastructure expertise was the natural missing piece.

Since our inception, we helped customers - big and small - with holistic and effective software delivery. To do that we need to grow our expertise into other areas - like infrastructure, data engineering, data science or frontend to name a few. Specifically for many years, we were involved in initiatives of doing cloud transformations or building cloud-native systems for many customers, including the FTSE100 or Fortune 500 organizations. A significant part of these was based on the Azure cloud in recent years.

Today we announce VirtusLab becoming a Microsoft Gold Level Partner in the Azure ecosystem. We believe that Azure is the right option for many organizations that are on their way to cloud transformation. Our main competency is cloud platform engineering and data analytics. This signifies the beginning of our journey to formalize our experience and expertise in these functional areas. We work with big and small clients, helping them with all aspects of cloud transformation - technical, organizational and cultural. In other words - Cloud Engineering and Azure expertise are first-class citizens in VirtusLab. 

The partnership marks our long term commitment to help our customers with:

• planning and executing Azure cloud transformation
• building truly cloud-native service
• large scale data engineering and data science projects

• overcoming organizational & cultural challenges (training, mentoring, team incubation, designing policies and building communities within organizations).

  We have helped many customers with their Azure transformation journey - from small startups to FTSE100 or Fortune 500 organizations. Don’t hesitate to let us know if you think we could help you.

This training should give you a good overview about different Data-related positions in the IT world like Data Scientist, Data Engineer or Data Analyst. After starting with an overview of different regions of Data space we will quickly cover mathematical and programming essentials. We will learn what the difference is between statistics and Machine Learning and why Python is lingua franca of Data Science. We will also go through typical Data developer’s work day. In the end we will go through an introduction to more advanced topics like Big Data, AI, neural networks as they are shaping the future of IT.

This course is a complete revision of the successful Advanced Type Mechanics course for Scala 2, with new material introduced for Scala 3, and existing material updated for Scala 3, giving insight into its relevance now and in the future, as the language evolves.

Advanced Type Mechanics is a two-day course for intermediate- to advanced-level Scala users to enhance their understanding of the language through its type system, the foundation upon which the entire language is built.

The course will develop participants’ grasp of concepts like path-dependent and singleton types; projection, wildcard and existential types; kinds, higher-kinded types and type lambdas; type parameters, members and variance; and much more. It then goes further to develop relations between these concepts, to establish an intuition for how the Scala compiler works with types.

Scala 3 provides, in its implementation of the DOT Calculus, a provably-sound foundation that Scala 2 never had, and builds upon this bedrock to provide a variety of new features such as union types, dependent function types and type matches, with additional constraints which help to guarantee typesafety. We will study these new type-level features, and explore the new opportunities they present for existing Scala 2 code.

Introduction to Kafka and the tooling. The training is aimed at people who never used Kafka before, or have a very brief understanding of it. During the lectures, it will be explained where Kafka is most useful and how to use it to fit the case. Workshops will be focused on gaining practical knowledge on how to use Kafka tooling and how to solve typical problems.

I am delighted to introduce a new member of VirtusLab’s external board of advisors: Martin Odersky.

It is hard to do Martin justice in just a few sentences, but I shall try my best!

Martin Odersky is professor of programming methods at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. He began his brilliant academic career as a PhD student of Niklaus Wirth before moving to postdoctoral work at IBM and Yale. While taking an early interest in functional programming from its understated beginnings, he co-authored the design of what was to become Java 5, introducing generics to the language. Later, of course, he created and nurtured Scala, a hybrid of the best of functional programming and object-oriented design, which is ranked as the thirteenth most popular programming language. It is no exaggeration to say that his influence can be seen in many modern programming languages, and his life’s work has played a significant part in the widespread adoption of the functional paradigm in the industry.

For VirtusLab this confirms and strengthens our long term strategy of active participation in the Scala ecosystem. With Scala 3 just around the corner and its potential for Reactive Systems, Cloud Native and Big/Fast Data, we have a great perspective on the Scala ecosystem.

VirtusLab is going to significantly increase its involvement in Scala 3’s ongoing development. This means developing the Scala 3 compiler itself, integrated closely with the tools around it, providing commercial support, and contributing educational efforts to the community. We are going to further intensify our existing close collaboration with the Scala Center and EPFL, as we aspire to give Scala 3 the investment it needs to become a trusted and dependable language, ecosystem and community, while we strive to increase its adoption and success in all areas.

In the immediate future, a significant part of our efforts will be focused on guaranteeing Scala 3 is delivered as a language its users can rely on, and that the transition from Scala 2 to Scala 3 can be smooth. This, however, is just the tip of the iceberg: we are starting work on many exciting new initiatives in this area, and we hope that you will stay tuned as we reveal more of our roadmap over the coming months, and join us on this exciting new journey!

That is definitely not all! This year, VirtusLab celebrates its position as a major player in the technology industry, with a decade of organic growth behind us, being one of Europe’s fastest-growing technology companies. VirtusLab is not just focused on Scala, we are already active in many other areas, both in terms of technology and business use cases. Given Martin’s breadth of experience, we are counting on his insights across the whole business landscape.

We’re excited to announce that Virtusity, our dedicated training division, now has a brand-new website! 

At Virtusity, we are committed to providing top-quality IT training designed by experts, for experts. Whether it’s cutting-edge programming courses, hands-on tech workshops, or sessions led by industry pioneers.

One of the most memorable moments in our journey was when Martin Odersky, the creator of Scala, hosted a special Virtusity lecture for our engineers.

During this exclusive session, Martin delved into the evolution of Scala, best practices, and the future of functional programming, offering firsthand insights from the very person who shaped the language. His lecture provided invaluable learning opportunities, sparking discussions and inspiring our team to push the boundaries of Scala development even further.

Having the opportunity to learn directly from one of the most influential figures in software engineering was a truly enriching experience. At Virtusity, we remain committed to bringing top-tier experts to help our team—and the broader tech community—grow and innovate.

Explore our new site at Virtusity.com and take your skills to the next level!

The beginnings

VirtusLab since it was founded in 2010, has been creating various products (according to customer thoughts) and building strong competences in the area of ​​Software Development Efficiency, apart from the typical work on software services. It can be said that R&D ideas have always been present in VirtusLab to build tools that improve the daily work of our programmers. In 2017 due to the fact that we have significantly grown, we had to pack our R&D initiatives in a process to make them transparent for everyone. We set a goal to search for each improvement that can replace manual, repetitive activities that occur during the creation of any IT system/app. Also thanks to our work for top clients, we could participate in building the most demanding solutions, and watch how project methodology looks in very large dev teams, often dispersed.

3 years of R&D in numbers

In the beginning, we encouraged employees to come with any ideas to build awareness of R&D. However, our specialization has clearly shown that teams mainly explored topics in the field of Software Development Efficiency as well as Software Understanding and Software Visualization. Therefore, we decided that exploring these areas would be one of VirtusLab's more important long-term goals.

During 3 years of VirtusLab’s Research and Development, we've been working on:

• 23 ideas (discussed & early work on PoC)
• 5 accepted PoC development
• 4 ideas* formed into full-time projects: Context Buddy, Graph Buddy, Vived, Jenkins-operator 

Growth through innovation

Thanks to the simple framework and intensive R&D sessions we are able to extract the most valuable ideas, design and develop PoC of products and test them in a production environment. Our employee’s research is improving the daily work of our VLteams, the services we are offering to our clients, and contribute to the tech community.

Since 2017, Financial Times, one of the world’s leading business news organizations, and Statista, a renowned research company, have been publishing the FT1000 ranking—a list of the 1,000 fastest-growing companies in Europe. The ranking highlights businesses from various industries that have achieved the highest compound annual growth rate (CAGR) in revenue over a specific period. The 2020 edition evaluated revenue growth from 2015 to 2018.

To be included in the 2020 FT1000 ranking, companies had to meet the following criteria (according to Statista):
✅ Revenue of at least €100,000 in 2015
✅ Revenue of at least €1.5 million in 2018
✅ Independent company (not a subsidiary or branch of another entity)
✅ Headquarters in Europe
✅ Primarily organic growth (internally stimulated)
✅ No share price irregularities in the past 12 months

We are proud to be recognized in the FT1000 ranking for 2020, marking another significant milestone in VirtusLab’s growth journey. Our #VLteam continues to expand rapidly, strengthening our position as a key player in the technology sector.

Congratulations to all winners & the entire VirtusLab team!

VirtusLab has earned a spot in the prestigious Forbes Diamonds ranking, a testament to its rapid growth and success. This year, the company proudly claimed 1st place in the Podkarpackie Voivodeship for medium-sized enterprises, solidifying its position as a leader in its category. This achievement highlights VirtusLab’s dynamic development and the dedication of our engineers, whose hard work continues to drive the company forward. 

Forbes Diamonds is one of Poland’s most esteemed rankings for private companies, organized by Forbes Polska since 2015. It recognizes businesses with the fastest growth in value over the past three years, evaluated using a reliable Swiss valuation method. Companies from diverse industries are analyzed based on their financial performance and asset value.