This company grew naturally, completely bootstrapped and works in a unique field of technology - digital forensics. Vitaliy Mokosiy who is the CTO of Atola Technology joined this company not a long time after it was created. Together this team now serves customers and helps them to copy and recover data using their devices and software. Among their customers are governments and businesses, some of them famous companies such as Apple, Hewlett Packard, Sony, and others which Vitaliy couldn’t name due to specifics of the field.

This story started all the way back in 2003 when Ukrainian-born Dmitry Postrigan and Fedir Nepyivoda started developing data recovery software. During those years they developed, improved, and advanced their unique hardware as well, created a full cycle of operations with offices in Ukraine and Canada, and a collection of partners and resellers in different countries.

Even though Vitaliy thinks that such a combo of highly technical people rarely end up successful, it did. They had no salespeople among the founding team.

Their product evolved with time (and effort) to, for example, one of the latest releases such as Atola TaskForce 2 which is their most powerful system so far and can work with 26(!) drives at the same time.

Their devices also can work with RAIDs (redundant array of independent disks). And as Vitaliy shared, its Atola’s high performance, super fast, and, one of frequent uses nowadays. 

“Let's say, eight drives sit in a RAID on a server. And some customers take out these drives, or receive them to work with them. Let's say it's a digital forensic analyst, who got this drive on a table and it was a RAID, either RAID 0, RAID 5. For more efficient use, typically it is for the matter of reliability. When one drive degrades, you can replace it, and it just works. And your server is online.

But when our clients receive such kind of drive sets, oftentimes they do not know any parameters of the RAID configuration. And if you do not know the parameters, then you are lost. You cannot assemble it into a single virtual device and you cannot access the data. So one of things that make me proud is a great auto detection and or auto assembly module. You plug it drives into this device with 26 ports, and it will automatically try to assemble the drive for you and show the results as directories and file trees. And then you understand that you can start copying already the assembled virtual device. It's one of things that can be considered as a differentiated value in our very narrow niche and we are literally the best in the world in that. It helps a lot when you have something unique, which is not implemented, unique, needed, and not implemented by the others because of the complexity level, and also, it requires a lot of product management work.”

What’s interesting is not only their product but also their commitment and team management. Quoting Vitaliy:

“I love the idea that your team is a product of the company and it should be the best product.”

They do have a culture of help and support within their team. Vitaliy shared that for instance, if somebody, let's say, a software engineer is in the flow, writing code intensively and working hard, it is good to come and distract this person if you need help with something. Surely that has to do with your work, that you can come to any of your teammates and ask for help and you'll receive this help instantly. Maybe with the exception of some exceptional situations, like interviews, demos, calls and so on. And, he considered, this practice fosters trust - you know that everybody is a helper of everyone, and it's a first priority, and everyone likes this. They don't hire people who don't appreciate this.

Atola promotes a fail-friendly environment. Employees are never blamed. They analyze some failures together, learn from them, turn them into something to learn from and move on - Vitaliy shared. For Vitaliy their culture is his passion. 

He also realized that it's also a great place to be in the Ukrainian office, during these tough days when there is war and sometimes rockets flying. And it's a place where people come and support each other. There's an energy of support and connection. 

“And another thing that drives me, by the way, is our culture. It's a company culture of wonderful people that are ready to help. It is based on levels of simplicity, sincerity, and experiments.”

They take part in a lot of conferences around the world so if you’re around check their team and devices out. 

You can’t build a great product without people and trust. Atola Technology proves that trust with your customers starts all the way from your internal company culture.

References & Mentioned:

• Atola Technology website 
• Vitaliy Mokosiy’s Linkedin 
• Conferences where you can see Atola's hardware and meet their team 
• YouTube Interview
• Podcast Interview
• Atola’s info page at Kyivlab