Anton Marrero, an IT expert and member of the supervisory board of an IT consortium, never planned to go into business, but by his own admission that is how life turned out.
"In 1991 I taught Artificial Intelligence at KPI and was considered a promising young specialist," Marrero told Obozrevatel. "With the country's independence, the world changed. A lecturer's salary of 20 dollars was not enough for anything at all, so I had to leave my job. By then I was very good at programming and wanted to grow in that direction, but nobody needed software. Several years went by looking for a proper job and taking odd jobs. But as soon as my friends and I found our first major client interested in software development, I set up a company right away — by then it was 1995."
Anton's first contract was to build an automated system for an agro-industrial exchange. On the exchange premises, behind the stage where the trading board was located, there were several small rooms, and that is where their young company set up.
Marrero recalls that the project was rather complex and risky for its time, and few people were eager to take it on. But their small, close-knit company took the risk, and the result exceeded expectations: in the first year each of them earned about 1,500 dollars, which was considered big money back then.
Their first clients began recommending the young programmers to their acquaintances. There were plenty of orders, since offices were being computerized en masse in the 1990s and businesses were developing specific business processes.
"Our main advantage was that we did not write ordinary program code; we designed systems and developed a model of how the enterprise worked," says Marrero.