G2

Luc A.

Strategic Alliances Manager

Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

4/30/2021

"Technological Partnership with European Shipping Platform"

4.5/5

Describe the project or task STX Next helped with:

STX Next is responsible for developing new integrations for Sendcloud with various carriers such as Budbee, FedEx and Royal Mail. As soon as we agree commercially with a new logistics services provider in Europe, we task STX Next with building the integration for us. They’re also responsible for maintaining the integrations and middleware.

Additionally, STX Next supports our core development team with making architectural decisions and day-to-day development tasks on our platform. Two of their developers work with our own dev teams in Eindhoven. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you like best about STX Next?

What I like best is that STX Next developers work side-by-side with ours. They are like colleagues to our own developers. What I mean by “side-by-side” is that everyone’s working from home now, everything is done digitally; meetings also take place in Zoom or Google Meet. And STX Next devs are part of that structure, they take part in the daily standup, they do retrospectives with us. So they’re really a part of our development department, I would say.

Aside from that, what I like about your account management (Christian and Kuba) is that they are willing to cooperate and think with us about solutions. So yes, we are a client but it’s nice that they’re also ready and available to discuss any topics that we have and give us good input. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about STX Next?

It’s not so much something I dislike but something they could improve on. We’re Dutch, we’re quite straightforward, so we won’t hesitate to be more direct and tell you what we think. Sometimes I noticed the people at STX Next are a bit more reserved. But we actually appreciate directness; you don’t have to wear a glove with us.

I know that might sound a bit strange in a client-vendor relationship. But I see it more as a partnership, and in a partnership, you can be direct with each other. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering STX Next:

Involve the people of STX Next in your process, let them be part of the project and have them give their input because their input is valuable. Often in such projects the decisions are made internally, but I would say involve the STX Next experts so they can tell you what’s possible and give you ideas leading to a better outcome. Don’t be scared to open up a bit as a company because STX Next provides good added value to the process. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is STX Next solving and how is that benefiting you?

The issue we’re solving is scalability.

Development capacity is scarce in Europe—and everywhere in the world, really. We have roughly 50 in-house developers but there’s still a limit to our own resources. In the past, sometimes we had to wait for an integration to be built because another project was in progress and the internal capacity was assigned to that. Now our team focuses on our platform, the integrations are outsourced, and that allows us to scale much faster.

STX Next also helped us a lot with the development of a new API/SDK that makes it easier to integrate carriers. The API/SDK makes it possible to not only integrate more easily, which helps with scalability, but also make maintenance easier. This gives Sendcloud more control over the integrations, as well as STX Next where they provide maintenance for us.

At the end of the day, scaling the integrations is where our growth really lies, and we’re very happy with how STX Next has been able to support us in this area. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.