„We opened an entirely new heading for our investments. We shook hands in December, work started in February, and a few weeks ago we created a subsidiary of Nortal under the same name in the United States and set about assembling our team there,“ member of the board Oleg Shvaikovsky summarized.

Nearly 100 million users

While Nortal is not allowed to disclose the name of its new client, the company said it is one of three leading cell phone operators in the U.S. Recent public information lists Verizon as the largest operator with 146 million users, followed by AT&T and T-Mobile with 134 and 73 million clients respectively.

This means that the new e-commerce solution created with Estonians' participation will surely reach nearly 100 million users. No Estonian company can boasts such an achievement in any sector.

The volume of the two-year contract stretches into tens of millions of dollars. „I do not know of a single Estonian IT company having managed a contract like that,“ Shvaikovsky said.

Nortal reached the U.S. market through Canada. Vancouver is the home of one of the world's fastest growing e-commerce companies, Elastic Path, solutions offered by which are used, for example, by Telia in Estonia, and whose official development and support center in Europe Nortal has been for the past three years.

„Now we have taken the next step in our cooperation and are about to become partners in USA. We will be a subcontractor in this contract,“ Shvaikovsky said.

One-fourth of the team handling the U.S. market will be located in Seattle, while the rest of the development team will work from Estonia and Lithuania. „Our subsidiary will have a life of its own that will go beyond this project – we already have new interested clients on the horizon,“ Shvaikovsky said in terms of Nortal's plans in the USA.

The Seattle office will have developers from Estonia, Finland, and Lithuania, with no plans for hiring locals at this time. One Finn has already arrived in the U.S. city and will be accompanied by an Estonian software engineer and a Lithuanian business analyst by the end of May.

There are challenges involved – the time difference between Estonia and Seattle is ten hours. „That said, in this particular project we managed to turn it to our advantage – we can develop 16 hours a day, not just eight, and offer so-called continuous supply,“ Shvaikovsky said.