Case Study - 6th Sense Analytics

6th Sense Analytics of Morrisville, North Carolina, offers customers software development tools. Its complex systems integrate with a myriad of systems and platforms, but there were some systems that the company's eight-person staff hadn't expected to encounter.

"oDesk is a unique way to scale-up intelligently."

– Todd Olson / Co-founder, 6th Sense Analytics

How oDesk Helped:

A client in Long Beach, California, requested integration with a legacy system — a VAX mainframe that has become so rare that very few programmers can write code for it.

"This was quite a sophisticated problem to solve" says Todd Olson, co-founder and president of the four-year-old company. "We accepted the project knowing that we would have to find a talented specialist with rare VAX coding experience."

Olson came to the oDesk marketplace hoping that among about 120,000 remote workers, he'd find an expert with both the rare VAX programming know-how and the networking and application development skills required for the project. 6th Sense could neither invest in the time and effort to train an in-house VAX expert, nor add one to the full-time staff for such an atypical project.

Even in the oDesk marketplace, it took awhile to find the right provider; most programmers don't even bother to mention this obscure skill in their profiles. "We did a mix of posting a job and proactively searching for someone," Olson says. "Once we got in touch with the right provider, it went really quickly and easily."

Olson adds that the provider not only had the skills, he had the temperament you want from any employee. "He had a sound approach and methodical process to solving the problem, and he made sure that he was comfortable producing the results before committing to the job."

Because VAX systems are rare and expensive — developed in the '70s and discontinued in 2000 — 6th Sense could not have a testing platform in house. "So from North Carolina, we facilitated giving the VAX programmer, who was in Florida, access to the mainframe at an HP facility in New Hampshire," Olson explains. "He developed the application within a record time of two weeks and remotely installed it at the client site in Long Beach."

Needless to say, the customer was happy with the results. So was the provider.

"From a developer's prospect, it was a great opportunity, too, because he typically does not get to write VAX applications anymore," Olson says. "He was really excited to have the opportunity to work on that system, because he thought there'd be no more use for the skills he learned a long time ago."

The situation proved to Olson that no matter how skilled his in-house team may be, the depth of the oDesk bench can be a lifesaver in a pinch.

"Even though we have a core team, we listen to the market and enjoy opportunities where customers come to us with challenging projects, and we can then leverage oDesk to respond with unique skill sets," he says. "We are all about catering to our customer's needs, but can't always burden our core team with one-off projects."

oDesk provides the perfect way to augment our core team, he says: "We can respond to opportunities as they arise and staff the project with the exact skill sets it requires. This way we don't need to assign the task to a team member who isn't perfect for it. When a one-off opportunity turns into a long-term one, we can add the oDesk provider as a full member of our core team."

Or, to put it more simply, he says, "oDesk is a unique way to scale-up intelligently."