American Business Association of Russian Professionals

Dear AmBAR members,

I recently helped co-found a technology consulting company called Cogniance (www.cogniance.com) that focuses exclusively on helping early stage enterprises, mostly venture backed start-ups, who need to build low cost, high quality products swiftly and predictably. Our founder and chairman is Mr. Juha Christensen, a seasoned technology entrepreneur and strategist who previously founded Symbian OS (a mobile operating system that powers over 65% of world’s smart phones today) and served as a VP at Microsoft’s Mobile Devices Division as well as a President of Macromedia Mobile and Consumer Electronics.

Juha and I have worked together for the last two years on a US MVNO start up where our dedicated team based in Kyiv, Ukraine delivered 17 high-complexity releases over the 24 months period. We’ve been so impressed by the level of talent and dedication found in Ukraine that we have decided to take our very senior designers, engineers, testers and data center people to create a consulting company. We’ve set up a team of 40+ people who can engage in anything from a-la-carte to soup-to-nuts projects, from writing use cases, designing UI, creating architecture, coding, testing, to running data centers from the company’s Kyiv based 24x7 NOC. We have world-class program / project management and HR infrastructure in place and are set up to scale quickly to accommodate various project sizes. Over the last two years, our employee turnover has been < 3%, which as many of you know beats the industry by an order of magnitude.

Let me know if you know of any projects where Cogniance can help. I am based in the heart of Silicon Valley and am ready to assist locally in any way needed to help make projects successful.