Yesterday Eesti Ekspress published my interview with Priit Alamäe (pictured), the Co-Founder of Webmedia – one of the front ranking Estonian IT companies and the author of about one third of Estonian e-government services.

The interview was dedicated to the recent 7 Million EUR investment that the company received from Polish venture capital firm Enterprise Investors. Here’s a choice of more interesting thoughts from Alamäe in a nutshell.  

Webmedia is doing outrageous work, carrying out complex and even sensitive projects in countries such as Qatar and Palestine. No other Estonian IT company has ever done anything similar. For example Webmedia has established the main e-government gateway for Qatar.

Though Webmedia calls itself worker-friendly company, educating its staff and being supportive on its workers spending time with their families, the company is not management friendly. Over the past 3-4 months, Alamäe has spent only two weekends with his family. 

Webmedia has development teams in Romania and Serbia, because Rumanians and Serbians are good-quality and flexible workforce.

Webmedia is active in regions like Middle-East, Asia and Africa. But the company keeps away from public procurements, where finances come from state budgets. Instead it is targeting orders financed by aid programs or the World Bank, since they are a lot more transparent. 

Webmedia has nationals from 15 different countries in staff. Among others Egyptians, Palestinian, Italian, Taiwanese. For the finest experts the company is paying over 5000 EUR a month (netto). Alamäe is convinced that there are no significant income differences between Estonian and Scandinavian top experts. 

Estonian are good in working out solutions (Estonian engineers are behind Skype, as we know) but we are very poor salesmen. Even Skype and Playtech – our leading IT sector companies – have their marketing outside Estonia. We have to find the right people, who would sell our products worldwide, because it would take generations for us to study this art.

Estonian IT sector has a lot to sell. Technologies enabling digital signature, mobile identification, our ID card system and even e-banking to some extent – Estonians are already used to all this and sometimes even grouch about it, but to many foreigners all this is unbelievable and absolutely incredible.

But that doesn’t mean we could call the Estonian e-government services perfect. Alamäe recently gave some friendly advice to the IT minister of Qatar not to focus on e-government, but to m-government. Internet penetration in Qatar is only about 15%, but everyone has smartphone.

Believe it or not, but there’s no corruption in Estonian IT sector. You do not have to bribe the officials to receive orders. Situation is much of the similar in Qatar, the only difference there is that you have to convince locals that you are better and more efficient than your competitors from Bangalore.

Estonian vision for 2030 should be to outperform Singapore. Our foreign policy should shift to foreign economic policy. So that when we provide civil or military support, we have to consider how this benefits our companies. US is pretty good at this.

Photo: Tiit Blaat/Eesti Ekspress