Our US: Kiev resident and his cloud platform defied Microsoft

Boris Kapitansky. Photos from the personal archive

Kiev resident Boris Kapitansky emigrated to the United States after the collapse of the USSR, worked as vice president for strategic development at a company worth 1,2 billion dollars, and then created his own IT business.

Now Boris lives with his new brainchild - the TeamFusion platform, which helps large corporations and specialists from different fields communicate with each other. In the healthcare sector, the product went viral - more than 20 thousand industry professionals from 182 countries began using it.

“You know, we have such a grandfather’s startup,” laughs 47-year-old Boris Kapitansky, talking about the TeamFusion platform. He considers the developed product the culmination of his professional career, which began more than 20 years ago, after moving from Kyiv to Los Angeles.

In Ukraine, the beginning of 90-x, recalls the captain, it was impossible to engage in normal business.

Having graduated from the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics of Kyiv University. Shevchenko, Boris got a job there - he taught practical programming classes. At the same time, he was engaged in tutoring: he prepared schoolchildren for the entrance exam in mathematics. Moreover, even in this he came up with his own original business model: he himself selected the students with whom he wanted to study, and guaranteed that the child would pass the entrance exam with an “A” at any university. Otherwise, I returned the money.

The country was going through difficult times. “My salary as a senior mathematical engineer was only enough for gasoline. I was married and needed to provide for my family. In addition, I really wanted to create my own product, but there was no such opportunity in my homeland,” Kapitansky explains his motives for moving to America.

Poor immigrant

Relatives sent an invitation, and in 1992 Boris Kapitansky took his family to the USA. It was not easy here at first either. There was no money, the newlyweds furnished their rented apartment with furniture that they found in the trash. “But it didn’t bother us at all. Even now I remember this absolutely calmly. The main thing is that we were doing what we loved,” says the businessman.

Boris Kapitansky. Photos from the personal archive

He basically refused social benefits and got a job at Wang Laboratories, which at that time was one of the three leaders in the software market, along with IBM and Microsoft. But on his very first working day, the company went bankrupt: several thousand people were fired, all the furniture was dismantled and carried out, only a small department remained in the big company, in which Boris had just settled.

“At my first job, I earned half the benefit we could have received. I went to the supermarket with a calculator. As I remember now, we could spend exactly $38,50 on groceries a week. While the wife was feeding the child, it was easier, but after he switched to baby food, there was absolutely nothing left for us,” recalls Kapitansky.

He worked in the company for long. He did not like being a small screw in a big mechanism. Soon, Boris met with the owner of an IT company and, in collaboration with him, created one of the first commercial systems on UNIX (a multi-user operating system invented in 1970-years), which made it possible to track changes made to the programming code.

In 1999, it was bought by Serena Software, which specializes, among other things, in change management solutions. The product that Kapitansky wrote took a key place in the company’s activities, and he himself became vice president of technology development strategy.

Over the period of its operation, from 1999 to 2006 a year, Serena Software from a company with 120 employees and an estimated value of $ 200 million has grown into an industry giant with 1500 employees and a capitalization of $ 1,2 billion.

“Boris Kapitansky played a key role in the founding of the Kyiv office of Serena Software, which still employs about 100 people,” says Cogniance CEO Mikhail Shraibman, also a former Kiev resident who now lives in Silicon Valley. “Our common values ​​are connected precisely with the fact that we both consciously decided not to sever ties with Ukraine and Kiev, but on the contrary, we want to help the development of the Ukrainian IT industry.”

Wikipedia + Facebook

In 2006, Serena Software changed its owner, and Kapitansky founded his own small company, International Technology Group. Four core team members are located in Los Angeles, with a dozen more programmers scattered around the world. Moreover, all programmers are members of the team and do not work outsourced, but exclusively for the International Technology Group.

The company began by providing service services, including taking on technological support for the Zurich “backoffice” of the largest Swiss bank UBS AG. Then, International Technology Group began developing their own product. Boris's interest in social networks predetermined the direction of development.

“I had a dream to direct social networks in a more functional direction and create a product that would help establish closer cooperation in organizations,” admits Kapitansky.

Cloud platform TeamfusionBoris has been working on his team for the last three years and has become a realization of this idea.

On the basis of the platform, organizations can create their own social networks like Facebook, forming specialized communities around them.

TeamFusion allows you to combine various divisions of a large company or specialists from the same sphere from different points of the world on one site, build their communication system to solve problems and involve clients and partners in the process.

Boris Kapitansky now lives and works on the ocean. Photos from the personal archive

In addition, this platform can accumulate knowledge acquired in the process of communication, systematize it and subsequently provide users with access to an extensive library of professional information. This is the “mix” of Facebook and Wikipedia for a single professional group.

The platform is ready to enter the market. The International Technology Group is now focused on developing a marketing strategy.

Challenge thrown

To check the demand for the product, the company launched a website developed on the basis of its platform two years ago. HingX.org. It is a free library and platform for knowledge exchange among experts in the field of healthcare automation.

HingX website developed by Boris Kapitansky.

The site is used by the World Health Organization, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and Asia eHealth Information Network, which includes 38 countries of Southeast Asia.

“HingX is a repository of files of different formats that are related to e-health. Its main value is that the platform allows you to index files before they enter the storage. This, in turn, makes intelligent search possible,” Alvin Markelo, head of the Philippine National Office for eHealth Program Management, shares his impressions of using HingX with the Forum.

Not spending a dollar on marketing, for a year, HingX.org has attracted more than 20 thousands of users from 182 countries.

"We are proud of the results that showed HingX.org. The project has become quite famous in its industry. After its appearance, other organizations also wanted to create a similar site,” Boris Kapitansky does not hide his pleasure.

In the multi-billion dollar market they are entering, they will have to compete with a serious player - Microsoft. They have SharePoint and Yammer - software products that allow you to establish communication within a closed group of people. But Boris is confident that he managed to find the giant’s “Achilles heel.”

“When communicating with customers, SharePoint salespeople admit that their greatest weakness is coordinating the efforts of internal and external components of the company, that is, employees and customers. We closed this hole and occupied a niche that Microsoft has not yet covered,” Kapitansky is convinced.

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