At Cognizant Softvision, we dream big but also take time out to celebrate even small milestones.

Cognizant Softvision Romania closed out 2020 with a significant milestone – 2,000 employees in Romania. We are only three months into 2021 and we’re continuing to mark local celebrations, even during the pandemic. For us, March is not only an opportunity to recognize International Women’s Day, but also a celebration for  all our colleagues from the Iasi studio. 

We’re celebrating 10 years of an active and dynamic presence in Iasi, Romania. And this significant milestone comes immediately after we exceeded 300 colleagues in Iasi alone, becoming the largest IT Romanian employer during the pandemic.

Growth, flexibility, transparency, thought leadership and constant learning and adapting to the context are attributes that have helped define us both before and throughout the pandemic. 

Recently we announced our new flexible workplace concept that allows employees to work anywhere within Romania. To help with this transition, we have redesigned our studios into so called ‘hubs’ to accommodate more employes from different cities around the main cities where we’ve been present with headquarters (offices): Cluj-Napoca, Iasi, Bucharest, Timisoara, Baia Mare, and Brasov (our longest experience with remote teams).

The Iasi Hub grew rapidly during the pandemic, and our plans for this year, as a result of the experience gained during last year in working with full remote teams (work from home), prepared us to integrate a few hundred more new colleagues! We have completely redesigned our work philosophy, and we are in the process of transitioning to a new concept of flexible work from the office. Our Studios will feature smart spaces to stimulate collaboration and teamwork, to challenge creativity and bring us together in exactly the right proportion of time to streamline work in technology communities and projects.

Since 2020, we have hired in Iasi, and the remote satellite regions, almost 150 new colleagues. We quickly adapted to the new work paradigm, and now we’re accommodating colleagues in the Iasi HUB, from the counties of Botosani, Suceava, Neamt, Vaslui, Galati, Bacau, Vrancea, and including our already remote team from Brașov. Given this focus and growth, Iasi continues to be a strategic Hub for Cognizant Softvision Romania.

We continue to use and develop the successful Virtual Pods model, a collaboration philosophy that goes far beyond a physical workspace. A successful new mindset of digital co-creation with clients, within a completely different way of doing business and managing company processes, Virtual Pods offers: 

• online interviews
• switching from in house tech meetings to webinars and online large scale events dedicated to technology
• online celebrations and online onboarding of clients and teams
• online mentoring and coaching programs. 

This does not include all our internal socialization challenges and contests to maintain engagement throughout our teams. We reached these results after 10 years, in which we built, day after day, scalable, stable and lasting relationships between our team and our clients. We are now strategic partners with more than 75 customers, many of them Fortune 500! Ten years ago we started with an application in the area of ​​media and entertainment, and today  our client portfolio covers a wide variety of business areas, from Finance & Banking, Logistics, Traffic & Transport, Retail and e-commerce, Agriculture, Media & Entertainment, Healthcare, Education, Fashion & beauty, IoT & ML, Smart Homes, and much more. 

We work hard at what we do, never losing sight of our goals. We have 12 Technical Communities that connect our talent globally, breaking the boundaries of specific projects. Beyond the passion for technology, we also have many other passions, and we like to talk and exchange experiences about them on many different occasions.

In these 10 years many things have happened: we have been partnered with the Iasi Computer Science Faculty in various educational projects for students; 

• we held and attended prestigious technical events (Codecamp, dotnetdays, NDR conference, etc);
• we celebrated Christmas together, and summer parties;we supported CSR, charity projects and were aligned with the Foundations while  supporting various causes.. 

We have already moved from old offices to newer and larger one, and now we have 4000 sqm today in two emblematic buildings, with logos proudly expressing our new identity, Cognizant Softvision.

All this is due to each of our colleagues, and I am confident that the same professionalism and team spirit will continue to open up new opportunities for us!

The Iasi Hub is „The Place To Be” even “now’ remotely and it will continue to be ‘Beyond’ to accommodate the preferences of our colleagues and respective business priorities!

Byline by Anca Dumitriu, Iasi studio, Romania