In the past year, Igor Zubiaurre joined the Consultancy team at Bitergia. In this blog post, we want to explain the role and importance of the Consultancy team, Igor’s background and path to Bitergia, and how is involved and leading the team as the Director of Consultancy.
To present Igor and talk about the Consultancy team, our CEO, Daniel Izquierdo, share with us some thoughts about it.
The role of Consultancy at Bitergia
More than consultancy, we like to call it partners. We build together with customers an enriched and polished experience where knowledge and technology play a key role. Consultancy as we understand it means bringing the best knowledge to our clients at the right time. Indeed, several Bitergians may interact with the same customer over the years, empowering them with the company knowledge, not just an individual. From technical consultancy on Bitergia Analytics or metric discussions to executive and high-level open source or InnerSource discussions, consultancy plays a key role.
How Consultancy at Bitergia has evolved?
Bitergia started its journey as a product company. Bitergia Analytics was indeed the central piece where other services were added on top of it. Over the years, we realized that more professional services were required to add on top of it, even to the point where consultancy started to fly alone as a core service of the company.
At this moment in time, as more customers joined the Bitergia family, we needed experienced people not only focused on executing but with strategy as a key part of their minds. By then, growing the core consultancy team with a senior position was stated as important by everyone.
Igor Zubiaurre, Director of Consultancy
For this section, we ask Igor why he wanted to be part of our team, also his background and experiences, and how this experience give Bitergia the piece of the puzzle we were looking for.
Why did you want to join Bitergia?
I’ve been a free software enthusiast since the turn of the millennium. I’ve tried and been an activist when I’ve had time for it. So when I was offered the possibility of making a living working full-time for the open source software movement I just couldn’t let it pass by.
Looking for useful open source software for my former regular job as an IT governance consultant, I found GrimoireLab and have followed the project since even before Bitergia was established. It stemmed from a research group at the university and they also ran a master’s course on open source that I found interesting as well. Eventually, I got introduced to them at some summit and we became personal contacts.
Fast forward half a decade. As an activist, I was trying to help search for investors in order to save an open source company hard-hitted by the Covid turmoil. So I reached out to a Bitergian to ask him for better contacts. We chit-chatted a bit, asked how the other was doing, etc, and being aware that I worked as a Consultant, he asked me if I knew any candidates to work with them. As he described the position, apart from targeting a more junior profile he was basically depicting me. So they hammered some corners and made room for me.
What experiences can you bring to the company?
I believe other bitergians are in better positions to answer this question but from my point of view, I think I have a wide and hopefully deep and useful experience covering technical and IT management backgrounds on companies of all sizes and many sectors, international profiles, and a hard-core drive for free-software. I definitely would hire myself for Bitergia 😉
Your first impressions at the beginning and future actions
I’ve already spent a year here and it has been a blast.
Meanwhile, I’ve become the leader of our consultancy team, which for a newcomer to such a small boutique means a lot of juggling and has kept me overly busy.
I now hope to slowly drift my focus from day-to-day firefighting toward more strategic work. I’d like to push the consultancy back into research and Bitergia back into the open community, and make the company more profitable so we can raise wages and fight the up ramping inflation.
You can reach out to Igor by connecting on LinkedIn or dropping a message by email. He will be happy to answer any questions!
