"We completely challenged what they want, what they were doing."

However, contrary to the expected behaviour of being polite, accommodative and rapport-building, we went the other way: we challenged their current landscape itself. We questioned what they want, what they were doing and why. And we told them, “We have identified several points of concern through our analysis of your situation. It will be challenging, but we can definitely turn it around for you.” To be honest, this ruffled quite a few feathers at DT. But, we knew we had to stick to our opinions and trust our ability to do a good job for them. The stakes were really high, and called for radical methods. After all, it had taken our sales team almost five whole years to get achieve this relatively small breakthrough.

With the approach mindset decided, we jumped into the deep end. We started ramping up. More people travelled to Croatia and we worked day and night through the pandemic to make the project a success. All this was done with a fairly young team who had never lived outside India.

It was not easy. Finding food we are accustomed to as Indians was net to impossible. The weather was cold, even harsh at times. To top all this, Croatia has frequent earthquakes. I can never forget that one time when the roof of the establishment where our team was staying collapsed after one such episode.

But we persisted. At the end, this project was a grand success. Today, after having completed three milestones, we are about to start the fourth one. The work we did in terms of app modernization, cloud native transformation and DevOps is now a case study. We now have a strong presence in Deutsche Telekom, Croatia and are exploring other possible areas of engagement in the parent company.