We say it for a reason: Push IT to the limit! In our search for companies in Twente that push the boundaries in the field of IT, we found Spectro-AG. A start-up from Bentelo that specialises in hyperspectral and multispectral sensors for UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) and UGV (Unmanned Ground Vehicle) systems. With the help of IT talent, Spectro-AG gains new insights, helps develop talent and increases the support for AI (Artificial Intelligence) in the industrial sector.

Using advanced technology Spectro-AG makes it possible to detect the quality of grass fields, downy mildew in vineyards, weeds, risk of mice infestation, unhealthy trees in forest areas, beaver tunnels or processionary caterpillar nests. Furthermore, they make 3D surface drawings using vegetation indices techniques and can recognise objects from space in satellite images. We spoke with founder Dr. Ir. Hamed Mehdipoor: “We focus on the research and development of the digitisation and automation of AI modelling and remote sensing workflows for drone and satellite data, especially for industrial sectors in the Twente region.” 

The company is growing fast, so they are always on the lookout for new IT talent: “Spectro-AG is growing and needs talented young developers with a high level of expertise for its projects, but we also want to help talent make progress in their careers. Finding the right developers is challenging for us. Fortunately, we have found TalentIT to take on exactly this challenge. AI automation is relatively new and there are few high-quality developers. The cooperation between Spectro-AG and TalentIT will help improve this,” says Hamed.

“Finding the right developers is challenging for us. Fortunately, we have found TalentIT to take on exactly this challenge.” – Dr. Ir. Hamed Mehdipoor

Two of the IT talents working at Spectro-AG are Cas Bolwerk and Emiel Steerneman. They study AI at Utrecht University and Robotics in University of Twente, but are currently working on a professional network in the region of Twente. “I finished my internship at Spectro-AG last week. The match went well, because it quickly became clear that we had a mutual connection. I will be staying on to work there part-time as well! The work consists, among other things, of programming systems that make use of AI. My internship project was about the object detection of weeds. We ended up testing it successfully through a drone flight.” Says Cas. 

His internship went very smoothly, but he also gained new experiences: “The work I was asked to do corresponded to my own expectations. It is very challenging and I often deal with technology that is brand new. When working in a start-up like Spectro-AG I sometimes have to tackle work that goes beyond my focus. This can be more than expected at times, but now I do have a better orientation of the company culture.”

“The match went well, because it quickly became clear that we had a mutual connection. I will be staying on to work there part-time as well!” – Cas Bolwerk

In a brief reflection and anticipation of his future career, Cas is very clear: “The best moment was presenting another project for Drone2Go, a drone event. Now I would like to move on to the technical side of AI, so I can focus on reducing the complexity. Then we can start deploying our models for everyday use.” 

Hamed Mehdipoor is also very positive about the IT talent: “We have had a very good experience with the three students who were introduced to us.” He says. “We have no hierarchy and we are all members of a team that will not stop learning, regardless of age. The young but experienced Spectro-AG team works with confidence in the talents of its team members. We make sure that team members enjoy what they do while advancing their careers. Our team is always open to new ideas and skills.”

Does your business also have a ground-breaking issue to inspire new IT talent? Click here or contact us at info@talentittwente.nl.

Huuskes is a knowledge partner, meal producer and total supplier for healthcare and corporate catering in the Netherlands. In addition, they deliver groceries to nursing homes, care homes, company restaurants, hospitals and other (care) institutions throughout the Netherlands.

Huuskes needs a large and dynamic ICT landscape. They are therefore constantly developing to optimise various ICT systems and links.

Huuskes manages all of their own business processes. Which means that they make their own recipes, produce, have webshops and also take care of all distribution, logistics and invoicing themselves. A large part of these processes are automated, from automated purchase orders to order picking with pick-to-light systems. This means that Huuskes needs a large and dynamic ICT landscape. They are therefore constantly developing to optimise various ICT systems and links. A side job, internship or graduation project at Huuskes is therefore always challenging.

The ICT department is responsible for the optimal performance of the entire Huuskes ICT landscape. Not only do they ensure the continuity and optimisation of the systems, but they also support all the existing users. The ICT department consists of 7 colleagues who are each responsible for their own part of the ICT landscape. Huuskes also cooperates with a number of external ICT partners, who take care of the technical management of all systems and applications.

At the start of 2020, Huuskes introduced a completely new webshop especially for its customers with restaurants and industrial kitchens. In addition to this webshop, Huuskes offers a native ordering app (Eten & Zo), which they use to serve small-scale care. The “bus” (Emagiz) takes care of the communication between the different systems. We are in the initial phase of linking these webshops to different purchasing systems. Interested in how the ICT supports our daily activities? Feel free to drop by for a cup of coffee!

Curious about our other success stories? Discover ours here!

“A’j d’r last van hebt, mo’j zeen da’j d’r gemak van kriejt.”

“If something bothers you, you will have to make sure you get comfort from it.”… Simply put, but true! That is the down-to-earth mentality whereby we develop software. Together with our customers we examine “what’s bothering them” and make sure that they “get comfort from it”, so that our software matches their problems in practice. The motto is in line with our participation in TalentIT; tackling the burden of the IT labour shortage so that we can excel as a region.

Together we achieve more!

Based on this mentality, we have been developing software in Oldenzaal for the municipal market for over 30 years. And with success! Together with our customers, we have developed 5 standard solutions, each of which is fully geared to market demand. By combining them, numerous new opportunities are created for municipalities to improve their services even more.

10 years Belgium.

We have been active in Belgium for 10 years and in order to support our customers there in the best possible way, we opened an office in Sittard 7 years ago. From that office 5 colleagues from Limburg are working hard every day for our Belgian customers.

By the way, we also like to see “our colleagues from the south” in Oldenzaal. Especially the Limburgse vlaai (flan) they bring with them is doing very well among the colleagues in Twente.

TalentIT is a good fit for JCC Software because we are looking for enthusiastic, innovative interns who want to contribute to our proven and user-friendly software solutions. Within JCC Software we offer you the opportunity to work with our software engineers and/or interface designers on new functionalities or user experience. We offer internships in the field of software engineering, marketing or interface & interaction design.

“During my internship at JCC Software I was asked to visit 10 municipalities for my position as Interaction Designer. This was a very interesting aspect of a great internship. I did my graduation internship at another, larger company. Which was nice as well, but I missed the fun and close contact that I had while working at JCC Software. That is why I applied for the position of Interaction Designer at JCC Software after I graduated. After 5 years later I have grown to the position of Product Owner and I still work here with a lot of pleasure!”

Sanne Wolbers, Product Owner

Through a lunch talk at study association Syntaxis, Douwe came into contact with TalentIT. He had finished his first year at HBO ICT and was introduced to Exxtra. We had a good feeling that Douwe suited Exxtra, which quickly resulted in the green light to start working together. The collaboration with TalentIT is very pleasant and Douwe is a good match. For our small organization, TalentIT is a solution to get in touch with talented software engineers at an early stage. So says Mike Vaneker, Managing Director of Exxtra in the case of Exxtra & TalentIT.

Douwe started in our team and was supervised by our lead developer Rik. The assignment was quite extensive (a monitoring system for websites and servers with all kinds of functionalities), so a choice had to be made which modules were feasible to deliver. There should also be a transfer to the next student, who will realize the additional components of the platform. Although we had some doubts beforehand, about what Douwe would be able to perform during the 2nd year of his study (without too much PHP knowledge), our expectations were exceeded. He handled the project very professionally and independently. We are particularly surprised with how quickly he picked up the PHP framework ‘Symfony’.

“Participating in TalentIT should be a no-brainer for every software company in Twente.”

In addition to his work, Douwe has also become a valuable colleague in our team. This is a very important component for us. He actively participates in business activities such as the pubquiz, dinners and lunches. Enough reason for us to ask him if he wants to continue working for Exxtra after his internship. He had no doubt about this. Recently Douwe joined us for various projects. He helps with setting up automated test systems (for Magento shops) and helps build custom applications in Symfony.

Curious about our other success stories? Discover ours here!

Sigmax offers plenty of opportunities for IT-talent

In addition to your IT studies, you can work for an international software company in Twente: HBO student Dylan Spaaij (21), did it and started working for Sigmax in Enschede via TalentIT Twente.

Sigmax Law Enforcement, one of Sigmax’s four business units, develops software solutions under the leadership of Managing Director Wouter Klunder to increase the safety and liveability of municipalities and cities such as Brussels and Amsterdam. For this business unit, Dylan joined the CityControl team, where daily work is done on a software platform for supervision and enforcement. After his part-time job, Dylan was able to continue his work at Sigmax through an internship. Because he was already familiar with the software products and was able to work independently, this resulted in very positive and pleasant experiences for both Dylan and Sigmax.

“Together with TalentIT we ensure that the talent stays in Twente.”

During his internship, Dylan researched how Sigmax’s Service Desk could be taken care of via smart additions to the service portal. Among other things, he worked on an FAQ environment that would allow questions from users to be answered more quickly which created more time at the service desk for other activities. This was not only an interesting learning process for Dylan, but also an enormous improvement in efficiency for Sigmax.

Dylan experienced the entire ‘application process’ via TalentIT as smooth and simple. After meeting one of the founders of TalentIT during an internship at Saxion, Dylan was quickly introduced to Sigmax.
Dylan is currently in the final phase of his studies. Fortunately, Sigmax immediately found a good successor: Dylan’s twin brother Mark is now doing an internship at Sigmax for his study Business Economics. This shows that there are opportunities for many students in different directions within Sigmax!

Loes Runneboom, Team Recruitment.

Curious about our other success stories? Discover ours here!

When the initiative TalentIT was founded, Visma Roxit (at the time Brein b.v.) was enthusiastic at once. We had been looking for opportunities to get exposure and strengthen our organisation with IT-talents. And it turned out that we were not alone, because the first TalentIT gathering was filled with organisations from the region Twente.

Of course, it was really cool that our collaboration paid off early May 2019. The first student, which was Wouter, joined our organization through TalentIT.

We constantly have interesting and, above all, challenging assignments. The most optimal project is to be determined together with the student. In our first interview with Wouter, he said he mainly wanted to learn about the communication between different servers. Within the VISMA Roxit software, we have developed a number of different components that communicate with each other using http(s). However, this came with several challenges. Wouter has developed a number of concepts that could provide insight into the performance of new techniques. An example of this is called ‘NIO’, which is integrated within Tomcat- servlets.

“In our experience the cooperation and professionalism of TalentIT is very pleasant. This certainly also applies to the students. Moreover, these students very quickly make a more than positive contribution to our teams and products, with new technologies, new insights and innovative ways of thinking they have to offer”.

Other challenges that have to do with the integration of different servers are:

• Loadbalancing
• Failover
• Session transfers (including security issues)
• Synchronous and asynchronous calls (present answers regarding ‘fire and forget’)

Wouter’s involvement in this project enhances the creation of a specific component for the session transfer. An important factor is that the rights can be limited as much as possible and that the ‘read- and audit’ trails are created correctly. An example of a scenario is the digital signing of a PDF document. This requires an external process (authorised) to retrieve the document, request a digital signature (from an external supplier) and modify the PDF with the correct signature and visual characteristics. Within this session it must be possible to request these things, but only these things and no others!

Wouter’s work attitude is very positive, he is very involved in the organization and is committed. If working days have to be cancelled or moved, he lets us know in time so that colleagues in office know when to expect him. His knowledge is also very useful and he likes to challenge himself with server2server communication. We are therefore very pleased with the candidate proposed by TalentIT and are already looking forward to new ones with great enthusiasm!

Roy Dikkers, Manager Q&C