Any organisation that collects information has data scattered in different sources: customers, employees, information systems, procedures, sensors, social networks, etc. But all this data is useless if it is not used. Therein lies Torusware’s value proposition in the market, a technology startup founded in 2013 by a team of researchers at the ICT Research Centre (CITIC) of the University of A Coruña, with the support of the Barrié Foundation.

The founding core, made up of UDC lecturers Guillermo López Taboada, Juan Touriño Domínguez and Ramón Doallo Biempica, together with a highly qualified team of engineers, masters and doctors of computer science, has specialised in technologies and projects for the digital transformation of organisations through the use of data and software development processes. "We are responding to the need for organisations to use their big data: their usually scattered and unstructured dataset. There has been increased interest in processing this information in real time to create new services and adapt them to each consumer", explains Guillermo López Taboada, CEO and co-founder of the company, which was named in the Ardán 2021 report as the leading company in Galicia for innovation and talent management.

Torusware develops technologies and projects that can be divided into two areas: the provision of corporate data lakes in the cloud and the provision of platforms to support productive software development based on technologies that support DevOps (a combination of the terms development and operations, which refers to the integration of people, processes and technology to deliver value to customers on a continuous basis). 

Both types of projects are dimensions of the same reality: adding value to data and improving the customer experience. Guillermo López Taboada, director of Torusware, gives an example: "In one of our projects, we used data from different sources (orders, production, customers and real-time positioning) to improve the quality of delivery in logistics, increase satisfaction with the service and thus the added value of our customer".

Torusware currently has a turnover of more than 2 million euros and a team of 35 professionals. They work mainly for large organisations and innovative companies with a global vocation, in sectors such as telecommunications, retail, banking, construction, aeronautics and the automotive industry, as well as with the public sector, from Smart Cities, regional governments and general state administration, to public transport companies.

Positioning Galicia in the ICT sector

Torusware has a strong innovative vocation, participating in highly competitive regional, national and European projects, and is committed to the value of knowledge and team training. 

They are a success story of how to compete and lead in the technology sector from the local level. "The companies in the ICT Cluster, a Galician sectoral group, are competitive in the global market. The ecosystem is interlinked and takes on significant challenges, such as the ICT City and the AESIA (Spanish Agency for the Supervision of Artificial Intelligence) headquarters, which, although both located in A Coruña, are intrinsically Galician assets which have a global impact", says Guillermo López Taboada. "There are 700 companies and 7,200 jobs in the A Coruña metropolitan area, and we are one of the top 10 technology companies in the region in terms of both turnover and employment. Our customers are international companies, and we are competing with global suppliers, proving once again that in the knowledge society, without physical, geographical or infrastructural barriers or limitations, it is possible to opt for opportunities in the global market", he explains.

In this context, he explains that the future AESIA headquarters will open up new opportunities, offer greater visibility and position Galicia and the sector as a key technological hub at national and international level.

"Although Galician professionals have been demonstrating our good work for years, it is only recently that companies and now institutions have become benchmarks, forming a technological hub with very high potential. A Coruña, which shows its strength in its growth, value creation and the ICT City, was chosen to host the AESIA because of the unreserved institutional support from all the administrations, as well as the competitiveness of the sector. Finally, it was chosen for the generation of first-level knowledge, both in terms of training at different levels, from competitive training courses and dual training, to leading degrees in the field. And also to benefit from the University of A Coruña and, in particular, its Centre for Research in Information and Communication Technologies (CITIC), the first unique Galician centre in this field, which is where almost half of ICT researchers in Galicia are based. It has the broadest scope in artificial intelligence, a field in which it specialises, as well as high-performance computing, data science and engineering, intelligent networks and services, and cybersecurity", he says.

Looking to the future, Torusware's most immediate challenge is to "increase the number of strategic projects that move from data analysis to data use to support the optimisation of day-to-day processes", he says. And in the medium term, "to continue to expand its sales channels via data lake deployment tools and DevOps solutions through companies that integrate our technology".