ROLL SOFT, not quite unions' darling

It all started in Sibiu back in 1997; after several years of work for the state, in the communications field, Raul Apostoiu decided to start his own business, eyeing high-tech. He sold his car, a Dacia, and put a computer and his flat on the line while his wife gave up her job and took some accounting classes. ROLL SOFT Company had six million lei as start-up capital.

ROLL SOFT (Software Developer ID & Access Control Systems Data Acquisition Systems) is the only company in Romania developing software for security, protection and access control systems of any type or level, according to Apostoiu.

It took ROLL SOFT a mere three years to reach more than 1bn lei in turnover, although it has five employees only.

“We make software for any protection and access systems, which in the industry language would be called , done by Radio Frequency Identification – RFDI, that is everything one could wish for, if one wants to have strict control over the activity and security in an institution,” Raul Apostoiu says.

Roll Soft’s partner on the Western market is Gantner Access from Austria, a company specialising in production of access-control systems and practically the main beneficiary of the applications developed in Sibiu.

The five employees of the firm, aged no more than 24 on the average, were taken directly from the faculties in the field in Sibiu and most of the training for specialising on access control systems was done on the job.

“The pay is great for this kind of work, but not many people are cut out for it.

This is because you need more than just minimal software knowledge,” the ROLL SOFT owner says. “Imagination is what you need most, as the market is extremely volatile. What we do here is a programmer’s dream come true: software research.”

The presence at the latest “Expo Security” edition in Bucharest in March made Raul pay more attention to the Romanian market, especially in terms of enlarging the distribution of equipment produced by his own company.

RFDI, something new for those accustomed to use turnkey protection systems allows identifying, classifying and locating people, animals or objects. However, although a security and control system is hardly expensive, there are not many beneficiaries of such services in Romania.

“One may say the Romanian economy is suffering from the lack of a strict control of the activities it carries out. I’ve been talking with various institution leaders and I have met with a lot of opposition in the promotion of our services, mainly where trade unions are powerful.

For instance, people are afraid of a strict control of inputs and outputs in a company or they fear someone might find out the exact time when the working hours begin and end.

But if we fail to introduce clear work regulations in the entire economy and have a strict control over how these rules are obeyed, we won’t have much of a change,” Apostoiu says.