Inspired by the Power of Data

My greatest pride is our clients and their trust in us, which we have earned at the cost of considerable effort. When we hear words of gratitude after a successful project is completed, when they tell us that we are their best technology partner, I understand that these efforts were worth it.

We have been working with some of our clients for over eight years, we have built solutions, we see results, and we have a successful history.
I am also proud of the people in my team. Over the years, we have successfully completed complex and challenging projects, structured business processes for SQL Server infrastructure consolidation and administration in major Bulgarian banks, financial institutions, and logistics companies.

I am proud of the thousands of colleagues from Bulgaria and abroad who have completed the training at SQL Master Academy – a program I created even before registering INSPIRIT and which is focused on training specialists in technologies for building data management and analysis systems.

Last but not least, I am proud that throughout these 13 years, my team and I have continuously supported the technology community in Bulgaria through events and user group meetings that I created. We have many reasons to be proud, but there is still much to learn and improve. The path we have chosen is to constantly surpass ourselves, using our moments of pride as motivation.

In 2010, did you expect that data would become fundamental to business decision-making?

Not only did I expect it, but I strongly believed it would happen. Information has always been fundamental to decision-making. Data is at the core of managing any business, even when it’s written by hand in a notebook.

The digitalization of business processes has led to the accumulation of immense amounts of operational data, shifting the focus toward its use not only for reporting business operations but also for business analysis and the creation of models to support both operational and strategic decisions.

Technologies have drastically shortened the path of data from operational systems to business management processes, transforming them into indicators and metrics for making informed decisions. Access to data and its storage methods have been democratized, while cloud-based platforms with their powerful set of tools and visualizations have made it possible to use the data for analysis instantly and anywhere.

In these conditions, our main role as a consulting company is to deeply understand each client’s case and offer them a tailored technological solution that meets their specific needs, while also helping them adopt and use it effectively.

What changes for a company after a successful data transformation?

Accumulated data is not just statistics and facts. It contains the experience and history of a company. It contains many answers that often remain hidden. By using the right solutions for analyzing data from operational systems, business analysts can identify correlations between facts and indicators, model results from potential future decisions. Companies understand how data can be used as a key factor in decision-making and realize the opportunities that lie ahead.

This is how one of our clients “rediscovered” its customer base and learned to better plan its services, investments and marketing strategies, which gave it a strategic advantage in the market. Currently, the analytics solution we built together is used by a separate trained team called “business development”, which provides guidance in product planning and plays a key role in making important operational and strategic decisions.

Our experience with all our clients shows that when a company invests in building data analytics systems and learns to utilize their capabilities, operational and strategic decisions become better supported, and identifying the problem areas of the business becomes much easier and faster.

You are consistently by the companies – from the initial consultation, through implementation, training, and support. At which stage of the overall solution do you see the business’s greatest need for expert intervention?

The experience gained over the years in administration and support, solution development, and training, combined with the numerous successfully completed projects, has allowed us to close the cycle of our services in such a way that we can offer a comprehensive service fully tailored to the client. This enables us to build long-term partnerships and assist them wherever necessary, whether in technology, processes, or team development.

Our clients don’t just seek technical assistance—they come to us for end-to-end strategy and data analysis platform development- ranging from a deep understanding of their needs and goals, through technical implementation, to training all the consumers of the solution, including providing advice and guidance on selecting staff and organizing a technical team that works with data.

They should enable businesses to shorten the path and time to create added value, manage risks well, and reduce costs.

There are many cloud technologies for data analysis, to the point where clients often struggle to figure out how and where to begin. This is where our role comes in: to understand the challenges our clients face and build a roadmap, feel out where and what the needs are, and support the process from all sides.

Offering such a service requires a strong team and preparation. What expertise is needed to meet this challenge?

Knowledge of technologies, or technological competence, is an absolute must for our consultants. There are two clearly defined levels of this competence.

The first level involves understanding the so-called features of the technology and how to work with them, which can be learned through time and discipline.

The second is the ability to assess in which scenarios a particular technology can optimally solve a given business problem. This cannot be learned from books or training alone—it comes from practical experience in project management, team leadership, and business processes. In this sense, one of the most critical tasks of consultants is to map business requirements to one or more potential technological solutions, which will ultimately lead to a good design and execution of the solution. This process requires more than technical skills—it demands excellent communication with the client’s team. Our most experienced consultants handle this task.

Moreover, being able to predict potential problems and avoid them, applying a comprehensive approach by seeing the potential solution from different aspects, and being a visionary and a partner to your client— these are qualities that businesses rely on us for. This is what our clients value the most, what sets us apart as a company, and makes us their reliable technology partner.

What helped you enter markets such as Norway, Sweden, Germany, and Denmark, where there are already well-established local database providers?

No market is exclusive to anyone, including our own in Bulgaria. In Bulgaria, we started from scratch, with our main go-to-market strategy based on my personal contacts and training employees of Bulgarian companies, our potential clients, at SQL Master Academy. Subsequently, these factors were also supported by the trust gained from successfully completed deliveries to large corporate clients.

The path abroad is neither easier nor much different. As a Microsoft Certified Master, I joined a group of outstanding internationally recognized experts. As a Microsoft MVP, I participate in conferences and seminars practically all over the world and meet a lot of people. After one of these conferences, I received a personal invitation to present at the largest Scandinavian forum dedicated to Microsoft technologies in the field of data. This was followed by an invitation to deliver several trainings from SQL Master Academy in different countries. This led to an offer from a large Norwegian group, uniting several companies, one of which is the largest training provider in Scandinavia, to become the CEO of a start-up company within the group, which would be of the same type as “Inspirit”. This was the moment when Inspir-IT AS was founded, and we recently opened a branch of “INSPIRIT Bulgaria” in Norway.

Every step along the way has been made possible by following a few simple but incredibly important rules: keeping promises, delivering uncompromising quality, and impressive integrity.  

What is the next goal for INSPIRIT?

We want to continue helping our clients by providing comprehensive consulting services for building corporate data management and analysis systems, on the one hand, and expanding our team with talented young people, on the other.

We have created a program for hiring young people who go through a three-month initial training cycle and follow a clear development plan tailored to their desires and talents. We provide professional opportunities to people from all over the country, as nearly 100% of our work is conducted online.

We intensively and daily train our young colleagues not only in technologies but also in communication skills, business correspondence, organizing and moderating client meetings, writing documentation, quality control of deliveries, time management, and planning. This requires significant effort from our senior consultants, who act as trainers in this process, but our goals and ambitions to be the best require it and the efforts are worth it.

Entering other markets in practice requires serious work and a highly prepared team. Our ambitions are focused on building a data product development team to support our business in Norway.

How do you envision the future of data management solutions and what will be “INSPIRIT’s” place in it?

There has likely never been a more fitting moment for someone’s imagination to run wild about the future in our field! At the beginning of this year, the world was introduced to GPT-4—the latest version of an AI model that literally blew up the IT industry. For almost a decade, AI had been progressing slowly, making its way to solve various practical problems that amazed with their results, but did not trigger any significant change.

Today is different. Thanks to Chat GPT, AI has become the topic of the day, and it will undoubtedly have a huge impact on the future of data management and analytics solutions. My expectations are mainly focused on the part of solutions that are designed to prepare and present data for analysis to consumers. I expect that in the not too distant future, queries to data will no longer require knowledge of a specific programming language but can be made in natural language—why not even in Bulgarian? I expect data to be accessible literally everywhere, and access to it to be just a prompt away.

At the same time, the process of data management, protection and security will become even more important. That’s why we are guiding our clients towards this process— data governance, data security and protection and the implementation of standards in this area.

Many exciting technological changes await us and we are preparing for them. INSPIRIT has always been a pioneer in the implementation of new technologies and this will not change.