Witad Awards 2022: Vendor professional of the year (business development)—Olga Orekhvo, CompatibL

Theoretically, a multi-cloud architecture hosting critical applications should underpin firms’ tech stacks. But in practice, using multiple cloud service providers can be expensive and troublesome.

Olga Orekhvo, COO of CompatibL, has smoothed the path to multicloud for clients of the trading and risk software provider. Orekhvo implemented analytics and business logic using a set of APIs called CompatibL Runtime, helping clients connect multiple vendor cloud applications.

Orekhvo explains that CompatibL Runtime allows users to run the same code on a variety of databases without losing performance.

“It also enables the software to run on a broad variety of cloud storage, messaging, in-memory cache—technologies selected by our clients—without forcing them to adopt the specific software versions or technologies that are required by particular cloud providers,” she says. “Because of that, our calculation and analytics engine can deliver performance and scalability on virtually any cloud provider of clients’ choice.”

Clients can switch cloud providers at will, giving them the leverage to negotiate terms.

Orekhvo worked closely with clients to show how Runtime could benefit them, and the results are clear: CompatibL reduced the costs of cloud deployment for clients on AWS by 62% on average, and on Azure by 72% on average, compared with deploying the same application on-premises.

This is not Orekhvo’s only success at CompatibL, which she joined as a business analyst in 2014. More broadly, she has overseen enterprise-level projects, managing a team of engineers, consultants, and quantitative analysts. She has changed the way the company builds and integrates cloud applications, contributing to its expansion in 2021.

Orekhvo also gained a SOC 2 certification for CompatibL. SOC 2 is a standard for software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies that store customer data in the cloud to ensure they have organizational controls and practices in place to keep that data secure. Orekhvo says the certification is voluntary, but it has become a must-have for SaaS companies if they want to compete for financial services clients.

She created a framework that made policy documents accessible to employees and regulators. Working across three departments, with more than 20 people reporting to her during the process, she ensured that all the documents were ready in time for the SOC 2 audit.

Orekhvo believes her entrepreneurial spirit and fascination with technology from an early age helped her understand all stages of the product development lifecycle, and rise rapidly at CompatibL to COO.