Innovation

In its work, Grid Dynamics implements various UN goals, but the main ones are focused on innovation (№9), healthcare (№3) and education (№4). Goals №9 and №3 are implemented jointly, which is manifested in working with various medical and pharmaceutical companies in order to create secure cloud environments that meet HIPAA requirements, introduce modern development processes, modernize large application parks and their management, as well as medical service providers, medical equipment manufacturers and patients.

We interviewed the head of HR Operations Team Lead, Irene Minasyan, who spoke about the subtleties of caring for people and employees of the company. Health care is manifested not only in providing medical care to employees, but also to their families.

In the field of education, Grid Dynamics strives to support local IT communities in the United States of America and Central and Eastern Europe through meetings, university programs, competitions, and much more. This allows Grid Dynamics not only to augment the level of general knowledge among those who want to develop certain skills, but also attracts new potential employees with needed qualification for the company.

Grid Dynamics' internship programs teach promising students the values of teamwork, effective communication skills, and mature development methods, and also allows young people to work in the company as interns; the most successful of whom have already advanced to leadership positions. These technical internships include intensive training sessions culminating in a final project.
"We are pleased to open our doors to young and promising engineers who are ready for life-changing experiences and are happy to work on creating complex projects in the field of big data, machine learning and much more. Each trainee is assigned a mentor who helps them adapt, shares knowledge and supports them in developing their professional skills. We also work with universities where our specialists become lecturers, and we also hold many seminars where students have the opportunity to ask questions and learn from our engineers," Irene Minasyan.

Inspiration

In 2006, the founder of Grid Dynamics, Victoria Livshits, realized that in the near future, cloud services would transform the technological sphere in several directions: the physical computer infrastructure would move from corporate data centers to cloud, where resources could be purchased on demand.

Next, the software would move from large box solutions supplied by Oracle, IBM, Microsoft to open source, lightweight services, in-memory computing and horizontal scalability.

Afterwards, the software development cycle would accelerate many times and move from major releases every six months to agile development, DevOps automation and continuous delivery.

This is how Grid Dynamics was born, a company that was supposed to become, according to Victoria's plan, a global competence center for creating next-generation platforms built on cloud services. It was the right idea at the right time. The need for such expertise arose immediately, and Grid Dynamics began to develop actively. Now it is a leading expert in the field of cloud technologies, Big Data, Data Science, DevOps for large American corporations with more than 1000 engineers, annual growth of 30% and offices in the USA, Russia, Ukraine, Poland and Serbia.

Overall impact

Due to the fact that one of the main goals in the work of Grid Dymanics is the goal №9: inclusiveness and sustainability of industry, innovation and infrastructure, in the course of its activities the company improves supply chains and production processes using the capabilities of Industry 4.0, plans and executes digital experience programs with serious business implications. Grid Dynamics also designs and builds powerful infrastructures for a data-driven enterprise and implements other broad spectrum of innovation activities.

In addition to the above, Grid Dynamics helps to create various fraud detection models that analyze customer data at the level of individual events, using both controlled and uncontrolled methods for reliable detection of fraudulent activities and transactions. Grid Dynamics combines fingerprint and artificial intelligence techniques to protect customers' businesses from bots, avoid losses and improve customer interaction.

Grid Dynamics is an official partner of Microsoft Fraud Protection products. They help their clients integrate into the advanced fraud protection ecosystem created by Microsoft, which includes a global entity graph and a partner network with banks.

They integrate innovative approaches and solutions to multiple focal areas and thereby develop themselves and help other companies to improve, which, undoubtedly, bring both long- and short-term positive effects.

Business benefit

Grid dynamics helps Fortune-1000 enterprises augment existing digital teams and inject digital-native culture, product mindset, Agile and DevOps mentality, and top engineering talent to transform and innovate. Among their clients and partners are such companies as Apple, LVMH, Paypal, Tesla, Macy’s, Visa, Google etc. Grid Dynamics has led a variety of major cloud migration programs for clients among the top 25 US retailers related to the modernization of e-commerce; order management and supply chain applications; green-field development of big data and machine learning platforms; and DevOps automation on Google Cloud. For instance, the latest partnership between Grid dynamics and Google Cloud Platform provides businesses with flexible and scalable solutions to drive digital value through the cloud.

As part of the innovative idea, Grid dynamics was able to accelerate delivery and reduce costs of companies. Grid Dynamics was invited to design and build a flexible deployment orchestration platform to replace the process of building complex staging environments manually on a VMware-based on-premise system. This new platform will provide self-service level capabilities for all engineers to speed up delivery and provide a better way to perform experiments. As a result, businesses accelerated delivery by reducing time to provision environments on-demand from 1 month to 1 hour. Furthermore, infrastructure costs are significantly reduced by the adoption of “on-demand” environments and fully automated test pipelines.

Developers now have a platform to perform experiments over an entire system, not just a single component. Nowadays, a Fortune 500 retailer works with Grid Dynamics to replace fragile and expensive in-house systems that were used for pre-production software testing. Grid Dynamics’ expertise in product discovery solutions for large enterprises helps leading retailers and brands improve customer experiences and reduce the impact of search abandonment brands.

Social and environmental benefit

According to Irene Minasyan, the main social advantage of Grid Dynamics is the creation of a diverse, enriching environment that supports and educates people, regardless of their culture, faith, ethnicity, language, or personal experience in the world. Grid Dynamics cares deeply about the events taking place on the world stage and how they affect the people who make up this organization. Irene Minasyan also noted that their global mobility program ensures the safety of their employees and their families so that they can thrive in a place that allows them to focus on personal and professional growth and not worrying about such important things as safety, health, and well-being.

As already mentioned, this company provides medical care to employees and their families, and organizes various online informational sessions. In addition, Grid Dynamics also holds various events to unite employees. For example, in 2018, Grid Dynamics organized a trip to climb Elbrus.

In addition, in the field of education, Grid Dynamics cooperates with various universities, including in Russia, where the company's specialists conduct many seminars and interact with students. For example, in cooperation with the Saratov National Research State University named after N.G. Chernyshevsky, the first laboratory supporting the training of engineers in the field of data science and artificial intelligence was opened at the Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology.

Interview

Irene Minasyan, HR Operations Team Lead of Grid Dynamics