What Is Moore’s Law?

Moore’s Law refers to Moore’s perception that the number of transistors on a microchip doubles every two years, though the cost of computers is halved. Moore’s Law states that we can expect the speed and capability of our computers to increase every couple of years, and we will pay less for them. Another tenet of Moore’s Law asserts that this growth is exponential.

Although cofounder of Intel stated that the change will occur every two years, since dot com bubble (massive adoption of internet) the pace has increased significantly.

Above stated historic changes created so many industries & opportunities for investors & entrepreneurs that, to those who ignored or disregarded such changes the outcome was fatal.

After second year of operation ATL Group, we have decided to create ATL Tech (2013), which is currently one of biggest software companies in the region.

ATL Tech is the leading force of our group and has been contributing to development of IT ecosystem in Azerbaijan since the first day of operation.

Starting from 2013 we have tried to hire best of best & although staff attraction was/is important we tried our upmost best to re-educate them & retain them. Nonetheless we have successfully enrolled an internal internship program.

Starting from 2015 we have enrolled top students from top universities to our internship program.

Total number of 142 students are from following partner universities: Azerbaijan Diplomatic Academy (ADA), Azerbaijan Technical University (AzTU), Khazar University, Baku Engineering University (BMU),  Baku Higher Oil School (BANM).  More than 30 of those interns received job offers from ATL Group & the rest increased their chances of employment significantly, due to the fact that we trust our interns with roles in real on going cases & projects.

Furthermore we have kept the statistics of our former employee immigrating overseas to continue their careers elsewhere. Since we started keeping record in 2015 (directly linked to devaluation of currency) 29 team members have moved outside Azerbaijan to work for companies like Accenture, EPAM, Volvo, SAP, Ernts & Young etc.

Regardless of intern & staff turnover we are planning to increase our footmarks in development of the industry and training of its occupants.

However, before I am going to elaborate & focus on education, would like to underline our efforts & input in startup ecosystem.

ATL Tech was the cofounder of the first IT accelerator in Azerbaijan “SUP.az” (2014) & which later became occupant of Innoland.

Even before partnering up with the founder of SUP we have sponsored & created many events focusing on startups, with two primary reasons. First, so that we have direct access to investment opportunities & second, to facilitate the growth & development of the industry in Azerbaijan.

Up to now we are positioning ourselves as a potential investor to local startups & we do exploit every chance we get in doing so. Up to now we have invested in a few both Azerbaijani based & San Francisco based. Moreover, I will cover the topic of startups & ATL Groups’ USA based entities in my future posts.

The year of 2019 was very fruitful for ATL Tech, we have launched a new entity called ATL Academy & generated a meetup platform for tech industry, called Expertech.

ATL Academy was launched in December 2019 and already we are facing high demands from students. Due to the fact that we are facing constant shortage of talent, we decided to focus on specific courses that will benefit ATL Tech in the long run. Moreover we observed a lucrative opportunity to enter the education in tech. Primary courses we have chosen for 2020 are C#, Java, Python, AWS, product management, front end & network fundamentals. By teaching these courses we aspire to make sure that our graduates not only solidify their skills, but also double their chances of desired employment.

As a group company we consider Academy as an entity on the rise which has huge potential, needless to say that it is the only academy which is directly backed by a tech company. Which not only is an obvious employment chance, furthermore we demonstrate real life cases from the industry.

As far as industry is concerned, in the beginning of 2019 we concluded that, what we have done and achieved in terms of adding value to the community and industry is not sufficient. Moreover, the tech industry and interest towards it are growing rapidly in the country and our team is keen to share knowledge and experience to create more value. Therefore we have created “Expertech” platform. Basically on a monthly basis we create a free of charge event for participants & invite highly accomplished executives from the industry to share their knowledge and experience. So far we had guests from Google, Microsoft, EY Netherlands, Cisco and various local organizations both public and private. I would like to thank all the speakers who’ve contributed to our cause & we assure that we will take expertech to new heights. The meetups are announced on our social media accounts beforehand and so far more than 500 people have visited our meetups & anyone who is interested may join.

Now that I have shared what we have done since 2013 in terms of added value to the industry directly. I would like to further focus on what we are doing in ATL Tech internally. Since day one we want to make sure that everything that we sell is our intellectual property, which means that we need to develop the software products ourselves from scratch. So far we have created 10 software products in our portfolio which are all branded as made in Azerbaijan. In 2020 we are planning to double the products in the portfolio and they all going to be branded the same. Furthermore we need to make sure that our creations have high export potential. By applying this strategy we as ATL Group make sure that our clients are not dependent on overseas vendors who do not have facilities to support the needs of Azerbaijani clients on daily basis when it comes to technical support of the IT infrastructure & software which was the case of numerous clients who signed with us. In this modern day of re-routing from oil centric economy, we are doing our best to fulfill our part.

Finally, I want to share one of our proud achievements, since 2019s first quarter we have successfully assembled a team in partnership with ADA University to work on artificial intelligence (AI). The focus of the group was to build a platform for speech to text recognition in Azerbaijani. Recently we have reached the average accuracy level of 90%. Which means that our system understands Azerbaijani language close to perfection. Same technologies are used by google and Siri, however Azerbaijani language is not a priority on those platforms. Therefore we have high hopes about the application of our technology in various industries across the country.

Within short period of time we have got closer to where we want to be, however in order to move on we need to stay open minded & under constant positive change, not only as ATL but also as the whole industry. We are in no position to disregard education, which is the essential part of prosperity & innovation.