Written by m4dz

For 12 years, alwaysdata works along Web professionals for their hosted PaaS solution to help them to deliver their services the better way. This community of makers is rich in knowledge and talents. We wanted to salute them.

We start this new blog post series to let you meet people behind projects listed at alwaysdata for a while. Here’s Occitech, a Web studio founded in 2006, for the first portrait.

What makes Occitech that particular?

Two developers lead Occitech. This particularity conduct to no business task force, and so on no growing business nor rentability objectives. What makes our people happy is the quality of the code delivered through agile processes, and the new technologies used when it fits the goals of the project, thanks to a continuous technological watch.

Decent work conditions, looking for good relationship with clients, and pretty much flat management allow to tremendous transparency about enterprise budgets and results. This way, Occitech’s salaries understand financial decisions and don’t dream when they work on new projects. They are more confident in the whole enterprise’s plan.

With a vast majority of eShop and dedicated Web apps projects, what technical need do your encounter?

Occitech develops business applications that use PHP or NodeJS® backends, with React frontend interfaces. eShop projects are based on the Magento solution, a technology well-known by the studio for several years now.

Some projects use modern technologies, like Event Sourcing, or GraphQL API for increased performance in client-server requests. Occitech is at ease to deploy those new patterns and technologies when they fit with project’s objectives, even if they are outside of their comfort zone. Occitech’s goal is always the same: to give a bespoke conception to specific needs, with the best quality available.

All developments are covered by tests and continuously deployed at alwaysdata thanks to the services provided by the platform.

Occitech works with alwaysdata since 2013, giving to its client the facilities they need

By sharing its dedicated services with its clients, Occitech gives a hosting service stable and efficient. Both alwaysdata servers’ horsepower and quick ‘n precise support allow Occitech to offer a high-quality hosting platform through a dedicated company: Ethersys.

This service is managed by a senior sysadmin, Cyprien, who provides precise guidance out of hosting scope, on clients’ CMS or other issues. Clients love him et congratulate him regularly… Thanks to alwaysdata and Cyprien, we’re able to offer to our clients both dedicated server performances and sysadmin support for a starting price at €30 per month.

By using the alwaysdata platform, new features that always come faster, settings more and more precise, languages versions always up-to-date, and other features, Ethersys can rely on a reliable partner for its service base.

Both for us or other teams, alwaysdata’s platform is an ideal for every developer.

We let Étienne Zulauf, co-founder of Occitech, to conclude those 3 questions:

A second studio created last summer. Commit42, who shares our office, and explore other technological and managing methods, is a great success. We confirmed this way our capacity to share our technical knowledge, and our ability to create synergies with a second team, both close to our technologies and inspired by our methods. This new company grows fast and goes to other horizons. It’s fascinating!

Then, we released a project started in 2015 that offers a solution to manage visitors screens for online stores, with modern technologies like React and GraphQL: Front-Commerce. Here again, the alwaysdata platform is a must-have: with a backend written in PHP¹⁾ and a NodeJS® middleware, compared to other hosting providers, everything can run on the same account, without any pre-requisites. We launched it in production this year on www.terrang.fr and www.chainethermale.fr, the results are great: modern tools for developers that will decrease their development time, without having to deal with templating; and really fast visitor performances for a better transformation rate for the seller. Some known French agencies will start to deploy the solution for the next months, and we try to reach the rest of Europe and USA… A massive program for a new trade that we still don’t know: editor!

A big thank you to Étienne for his time in this interview game, and for his audacity to be the first one in the series. We will let you discover other passionating Web people that use alwaysdata solution.

And during the end of the year, some new features are coming, stay tuned!