pimg src="http://www.magentocommerce.com/images/uploads/aitoc.png" style="border: 0;" alt="image" width="195" height="72" / /p p As some of you a href="http://www.magentocommerce.com/blog/comments/magento-connect-features-belarus-based-aheadworks/" title="might have noticed"might have noticed/a, we’ve been featuring Magento Connect developers here on the Magento Blog. /p p Today’s featured developer is a href="http://www.aitoc.com/" title="AITOC"AITOC/a, a company that has been developing Magento extensions for the past year.nbsp; In that time, AITOC has learned a lot about our extension marketplace, and with nearly 40 active extensions on a href="http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect" title="Magento Connect"Magento Connect/a, they have some great insights amp; best practices for developers looking to take their business to the next level. /p p The company is in a similar position to many others in our community, where ideas for new extensions come out of actual client work.nbsp; The work is packaged for Magento Connect and gradually improved upon with user feedback.nbsp; It’s a very successful model that results in top-selling products that solve real-world needs.nbsp; /p p The following interview is with Vlad Babarykin, AITOC’s CEO.nbsp; /p p bThanks Vlad for setting some time aside to speak with us.nbsp; First, AITOC is an interesting name.nbsp; How did you come up with it?/b br / AITOC used to stand for Advanced IT Offshore Consulting. The company started in 2001 as an outsourcing company.nbsp; Our business has changed since then, but we liked the distinct sound of the name so we kept it. /p p bHow would you describe your business model?/b br / We build up our technological and managerial expertise around three competences: /p p • uWeb development/u: As of today AITOC has successfully carried out over one hundred web-development projects of various complexities across a wide range of industries. /p p • uCustomization of ready made products and web solutions/u: To increase the value that AITOC can deliver, we apply our web-development to customizing existing solutions.nbsp; Having performed hundreds of customizations and integrations, AITOC has gained significant expertise with phpFox and Magento. We eventually began to support this experience with extensions that we customized for these solutions. /p p • uProduct development/u: Through our customization experience we learned a great deal about what Magento users really needed. We narrowed those needs down to a few essential ones and developed ready-made solutions that deliver great value to our customers at a price that is much lower than custom development.nbsp; We also offer high-quality and professional support. /p p bWhat is your company’s proudest accomplishment?/b br / In the past year, when the global financial crisis was tough on the IT outsourcing industry, we’ve managed to maintain the company, avoid layoffs, enter new markets and produce many new successful products. /p p bHow long have you been in business and how long have you been developing extensions for Magento?/b br / The company was founded in 2001, and we’ve been developing Magento extensions for almost a year now. /p p bHow did you discover Magento and why did you decide to make this platform an important part of your business?/b br / To foster further company growth, we were searching for a fast-growing market that would enable us to develop more small products.nbsp; After we considered and analyzed many options, Magento emerged as the perfect choice. /p p bHow does the Magento Connect marketplace benefit you?/b br / Magento Connect is the ultimate marketplace that gathers a large audience and provides the opportunity to deliver information about our products to our potential customers. /p p Also, we’ve built up our knowledge base about customer needs by interacting with the Magento community and collecting information from product reviews, groups and forums.nbsp; All of this feedback amp; data helps us improve our current extensions and generate ideas for new ones.nbsp; /p p bHow many extensions do you have in the Connect marketplace?/b br / We have 37 extensions in our portfolio.nbsp; Eleven of them were originally developed by AdjustWare, but in the late 2009 we acquired AdjustWare and all of their extensions.nbsp; After revising the code to make the new extensions comply with our standards and compatible with our other products, we re-released AdjustWare’s extensions as a part of our portfolio. /p p bWhat are your top-selling extensions?/b br / Many of our extensions are quite popular, but as of today, our top-selling extensions are a href="http://www.magentocommerce.com/extension/1289/shop-by-brands" title="Shop by Brands"Shop by Brands/a, a href="http://www.magentocommerce.com/extension/1844/advanced-permissions" title="Advanced Permissions"Advanced Permissions/a and a href="http://www.magentocommerce.com/extension/2564/magento-booster/" title="Magento Booster"Magento Booster/a. /p p bWhat are some of the lessons you’ve had to learn to be successful in the Connect marketplace?/b br / • One lesson is that the time we invest in extension development doesn’t often determine the extension’s success.nbsp; Rather, the problems that the extension solves has greater impact.nbsp; It is more important to be focused on solving problems rather than writing and testing lots of code.nbsp; br / • We also learned that offering free community extensions helps to raise awareness of the company. br / • Product name and packaging matter. /p p bWhat advice would you give to a new developer who wants to start building extensions for Magento Connect?/b br / • Thorough knowledge about the needs of Magento users is essential to selecting the ideas for new extensions that will sell. br / • Test your extensions to minimize the number of support requests.nbsp; New extensions receive a lot of support requests, so be sure to take care of minor problems up front.nbsp; br / • Generate your own ideas for new extensions, don’t copy existing ones.nbsp; There are plenty of unresolved problems, and you’ll occupy a better competitive position by being the first one to offer a solution. /p p bHow many developers do you have on staff now?/b br / We have 31 developers focusing on developing extensions and customizations. /p p bAre you planning to hire this year?/b br / Yes, we are hiring now. However, we really plan to grow the company by optimizing our processes to make it more efficient. /p p bWhat has been your greatest business challenge over the last year?/b br / The biggest challenge over the last year was to grow the company’s revenue despite of the global financial crisis.nbsp; I’m glad that we succeeded at this. /p p bWhat else would you like the community to know about your business and your extensions?/b br / AITOC is one of the few companies that considers Magento-extension development a big part of their primary business. Small-product development is a part of our strategy, now that we’ve shifted from outsourcing to product development. We’ve also built up a large knowledge base about Magento and its users’ needs, which we continually draw from to develop new extensions. /p p The fact that extensions are big part of our primary business also incentives us to provide high-quality timely support to our customers. /p p We also make sure that our extensions come well equipped with video tutorials, live demos, and user manuals. Whenever applicable, we feature real Magento stores using our extensions in our videos. You can see some of these in action on our a href="http://www.youtube.com/aitocvideos " title="YouTube channel"YouTube channel/a. /p p We also offer bulk and accrual discounts to our clients and conduct the only ongoing lottery for Magento users. br / /pbr /hr style="border:none; background:#bbb; height:1px; overflow:hidden;"/table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" border="0"trtd valign="top" width="90" align="left"a href="http://twitter.com/magento"img src="http://www.magentocommerce.com/img/magento_on_twitter.png" //a/tdtd valign="top" width="220" style="padding:0;"strongfont size="-2"FROM THE MAGENTO TWITTER FEED/font/strong/spanpa href="http://twitter.com/magento/statuses/9172750161"Magento Solution Partner Program Maintains Momentum http://is.gd/8tFuh/a/ppa href="http://twitter.com/magento"strongfont size="-2"Follow Magento on Twitter »/font/strong/a/p/tdtdimg src="http://www.magentocommerce.com/img/clear.gif" width="10px" /img src="http://www.magentocommerce.com/img/feed_separator.png" //tdtd valign="top" width="90" align="left"a href="http://www.magentocommerce.com/support/magento-user-guide-book"img src="http://www.magentocommerce.com/img/magento_ebook.png" //a/tdtd valign="top" width="220" style="padding:0;"strongfont size="-2"NOW AVAILABLE/font/strongpa href="http://www.magentocommerce.com/support/magento-user-guide-book"The Official Magento User Guide by Varien is here!/a/ppa href="http://www.magentocommerce.com/support/magento-user-guide-book"strongfont size="-2"Get your eBook today »/font/strong/a/p/td/tr/tablediv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/magento?a=kMwtOQT5feA:Wud8Me5Uio0:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/magento?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/magento?a=kMwtOQT5feA:Wud8Me5Uio0:7Q72WNTAKBA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/magento?d=7Q72WNTAKBA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/magento?a=kMwtOQT5feA:Wud8Me5Uio0:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/magento?i=kMwtOQT5feA:Wud8Me5Uio0:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/magento/~4/kMwtOQT5feA" height="1" width="1"/

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