The Making of Abysalto

Abysalto, as a company, was created through a project called Elevate. Our business goal was (and still is) a simple one: to consolidate the software business of the KING ICT group under one “roof.”

This encompasses people, culture, mindset, governance, technology, processes, knowledge, and market presence. We aimed to establish a new, refreshed, and consolidated company with a clear mission: to create complex software systems that simplify our lives. All supporting segments and services (infrastructure, network, security, hardware, etc.) will be handled by our parent company; our focus is software, and we aspire to be the best at it.

This sounds logical, and it certainly is. It may sound simple, but it is far from it. However, it is both challenging and extremely ambitious.

We began in June 2024 with the following landscape:

We have three companies (KING ICT, Omega software, and Aktivis) within an IT group, specializing in software solutions for the government industry (ERP solutions, process digitalization, and “paperless” government), transportation (e-ticketing and public transport solutions), and SEMS (energy consumption optimization and ESG).
All three companies develop various custom software solutions, ranging in size from small projects to complex, nation-wide critical IT systems.
We serve the same customers with different solutions from different companies.
We operate in diverse technologies, IT environments, and development frameworks.
Knowledge sharing between companies is very limited. We all develop similar components for our systems, many of which could and should be created once and reused (“inventing hot water,” as we say in Croatia).
We are independently improving our everyday business environment, considering and implementing AI in our daily work and solutions.
Together, we are a significant participant in the Croatian IT software sector, which is mostly saturated. We strongly believe that we can achieve success by expanding into other markets.
We have different cultures, mindsets, processes, and internal organizations. All three companies have strengths and weaknesses, and they are not entirely compatible.
We are a large entity—over 300 employees—with great potential in our top performers. Big kudos to all of them.

All of these points indicate that consolidation is a “no-brainer.”

When we drafted this project between June and August of 2024, we set the following goals:

First and foremost, we want all our employees to participate in this transformation, and we want it to be as smooth as possible for them.
This project must have minimal negative impact on our current clients and projects. Quite the contrary, we aim to deliver more and with higher quality to our existing clients. Our mission is positive and ambitious, and we want the market to perceive it accordingly.
During execution, we are determined to implement technological and methodological changes in how we design and build software. We want to excel at this, leveraging the best practices from our three companies and addressing any gaps. Our people are more than capable of achieving this.
We want to build a new culture for Abysalto—incorporating the “best of” what we currently have and fostering a mindset of courage, determination, and expertise.
The structure we are building must be ready for international growth. Having established a strong presence in the Croatian IT market over the last 20 years, we are now ready to take the next step.

In the aftermath of the Elevate project, I can say that we executed many of our plans successfully, but we also had our share of missteps and wrong calls.

I’ll try to cover many interesting aspects of this project in future posts – PM, Employee aspect, legal side, organization, culture, market and clients, change management and more.

Stay tuned!
Željko Tandarić