Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.
I run technology for Elbtal Digital AG, a growth-stage Nonprofit & NGO company based in Frankfurt, Germany. My role as Chief Innovation Officer covers product engineering, platform operations, and our vendor relationships. We'd hit a point where our internal capacity just couldn't keep pace with what the roadmap demanded.
What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?
Our DevOps Services capability had become the thing slowing everything else down. New feature requests, client asks, internal initiatives — all of it kept queuing up behind a platform that had been stretched way past what it was originally built for. We needed a proper rebuild, not another patch.
What services did the company provide for your project?
The scope ran the full DevOps Services lifecycle — discovery, requirements, architecture, development across roughly a dozen sprints, integration testing, performance validation, deployment, and a four-week hypercare window afterward. They also handed over full documentation and ran a knowledge transfer session for our internal team.
Why did you choose this company over other providers you considered?
We shortlisted five vendors through a structured process. The technical review knocked two out right away. Of the remaining three, this team stood out because their DevOps Services approach was specific rather than generic, backed by actual reference projects in Nonprofit & NGO — not just case studies pulled off a website. The reference calls confirmed everything the proposal claimed.
How clearly did the company understand your requirements and business goals?
Very well. The discovery phase was more thorough than anything we'd been through with prior vendors. They pushed back on requirements that were vague or contradictory, suggested better alternatives where our own thinking was limited, and produced a spec our internal stakeholders agreed was the clearest version of the product they'd ever seen written down.
How was your overall experience with their communication and project management?
Genuinely excellent, especially given the time difference between Frankfurt, Germany and the delivery team. Written updates were consistent and specific, anything needing a decision got same-day turnaround, and nothing slipped through the cracks across the whole engagement.
Did the company deliver the project on time and within your expected budget?
On time and inside the approved budget. Their estimating was notably accurate — they'd broken the work down in enough detail during discovery that the forecast held up the whole way through, instead of drifting with every small change. We had exactly one change request, and it was for scope we added ourselves.
What tangible results or business impact have you seen since the project was completed?
The clearest measure is how the system's actually performing in production. In the four months since go-live we've had zero major incidents, our page performance scores improved across every Core Web Vitals metric, and two enterprise clients who'd previously flagged our old platform's limits during renewal talks signed again without raising it.
What did you like most about working with this company?
The team stayed the same the whole way through. The engineers in the discovery sessions were the same ones who built the system. That continuity matters more than people expect, and you really only notice it when it's missing. Every conversation picked up where the last one left off.
Would you recommend this company to others, and would you work with them again?
Without reservation. We're already in early conversations about a second engagement, and I expect this to turn into a multi-year relationship. Anyone in Nonprofit & NGO looking for real DevOps Services depth paired with actual delivery discipline should have this team near the top of their list.