QUOBIS was celebrating its 13th anniversary this summer. This is a special year, as we have reached the threshold of 50 employees (currently 55), becoming a medium-size company. This was a long journey since we started in 2006.

QUOBIS´ journey: from telephony engineering services to real-time communications technology provider

During these years we have focused our activities on real-time communications.

In 2006 we started to build communications platforms based on Asterisk (an open-source solution to build PBXs), for medium-sized companies closed to our headquarters.

Soon, we realized the opportunity of SIP trunking (to connect corporate PBX to telcos, instead of using legacy technologies of analog or PRI lines), where we could help to provide professional services for the integration of Session Border Controllers. This opened up the possibility of working with larger companies (including most of the top 20 companies in Spain)

We kept the activities with Asterisk and other open-source communications tools as a second line of business, focused on building media server ad-hoc functionalities for special requirements.

Early contributors to WebRTC technology: building the new standard

In 2012 we started to work with WebRTC. This was not casual, as this technology was announced as the biggest change in the real-time communication world for the last years and some vendors (including manufacturers of session border controllers) were launching solutions to interconnect the WebRTC signaling and media to SIP. As we started in the early stages of the technology, we spent some time working on standardization and we detected a business opportunity of building our own application server for WebRTC (Sippo).

A big step forward: Becoming technology owners of Sippo

This means one of the biggest challenges for Quobis, moving from a service company to develop our own products. This represented not only building a team of developers, quality assurance and product management, as we had to change our marketing and operation processes.

Growing together: from local to the global organization

We moved from a company providing service to local (mostly in Spain) companies to having a global market, making deals with partners and resellers, adopting English for communication, having a presence in worldwide events, etc.

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This helped us to increase the results, incomes and team members but, at the same time, we make some efforts to maintain the philosophy of a small company. Being more than 50 is difficult, but we like to be transparent in our management, providing information about the performance of the company, the biggest challenges in the short-term, current activities and projects with customers, etc. that help all the team to be involved in the project.

After working hard, it’s time to play hard

In QUOBIS we are used to celebrating things, as we like to stop for a while for small parties (birthdays, welcomings of new employees, etc). This is something we did for the anniversary, enjoying some pastries and cakes together. This year we added a quiz based on Kahoot with some funny questions about the company and local facts. The winner won a leisure trip to a resort with his family. 

In addition, we used this event to select the destination of the IX Quobis Outdoor Camp. This event is something similar to a company day but with no internal motivational speeches or so. We just travel together to a place to do an activity together. 

This year we selected A Illa de Arousa, a fantastic island in one of the bays of Galicia. There, we split the team into groups of 6 in order to participate in a gymkhana with three different parts: first, we had to search, in bikes,  for some hidden clues along the islands, thanks to a treasure map; second, a kayak in pairs to go to Areoso (a mystic island around 1 mile to A Illa), just to get another part of the map; third, finally we needed to find the final clue just running. In addition, we had some time to enjoy the local food in one of the restaurants.