Intern in the City

Chris Alexander's post about what it is like working as an intern at Kusiri has been added to the TechHub website.

Every year for the past four years, I have embarked on a quest to find myself an internship at a tech company for the summer between academic years. I am a programmer at heart and have always taken the vacations as an opportunity to expand on the development work that I do in my spare time, in a full-time role.

My first placement was at Huddle, a Bermondsey (and now Old Street and San Francisco) based collaboration startup who you will have seen in the news recently. My next was at TweetMeme, the Reading based social sharing and filtering company who pivoted into DataSift during my 18-month placement there. Both of these were distinctly different from what I've been learning on a day-to-day basis in my Robotics degree, but neither as different as the company where I have found myself this year.

Called Kusiri, this 2 year old company based just down the road from TechHub in EC2 provides enterprise-grade software to global banks and international financial service providers. The Kusiri CAMRA product provides search federation, allowing organisations to easily integrate existing internal and external databases, websites and search servers into a single unified search interface and query language. It is available as software for existing corporate infrastructure; in a SaaS cloud configuration; and on clustered and single-server appliances.

I met the founders of Kusiri at a TechHub networking event and was intrigued by what is a completely different industry to what I’m used to. A startup that sells to corporates is a very different beast to consumer web startups which we are all used to hearing about from Silicon Roundabout and the Valley; from my perspective, it presents challenges not only on a technical but also a non-technical front.

From a technical perspective, development cycles are generally longer - turning around security-approved absolutely bug free releases takes time. There are other issues that come with conforming to client policies, for example getting all of your code working with specific archaic versions of Windows in the deployment - something startups in other sectors can simply (and wisely) choose to ignore.

However, there are new challenges that aren’t to do with code that come from working in the City. A background in consumer web won’t get you far here: meetings are peppered with acronyms I’ve never heard of, names it sounds like I should know but definitely don’t, and stories that I can’t relate to. “A lot of money” also has a completely different definition in this world.

However, this placement has also given me an opportunity to learn about an entirely new industry from the people who have lived and breathed it for years, imparting their considerable knowledge in the area so that I may learn, improve, and (eventually) fit in. There are of course the usual startup perks - bean bags, office cats, and large amounts of caffeine - that we never do without; we may be in the City, but we’re still a startup through and through.