Octopus team

Julien is the coordinator of the Octopus team, based in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Graduated from Montpellier IT School “EPSI” in 2004, Julien caught the opportunity to travel to the other side of the world, landing in South Korea where he stayed for four years working for the French Embassy and completing a master in international studies in Seoul. He joined OXUS group in early 2008 as MIS expert in Tajikistan. Now based in Bishkek since 2010, he oversees the platform in charge of development of Octopus.

Yoann joined the Octopus team in 2010, in charge of the business development of the project. He Graduated from ISEN engineering school in Lille. After a first experience in lean management at GDF-SUEZ, he started as free-lance consultant and made various missions of capacity building in communication and fundraising for nonprofit organizations in Chile, Togo, Benin and Burkina-Faso. In 2008 he assisted the launch of the microfinance and social business platform “ICMSE” in Bangladesh. Since joining the Octopus team, Yoann travels the globe to animate the open source community, promote the project and train users.

Graduated Appling Mathematics department of Kyrgyz National University and obtained master degree in this university 6 years ago too. Andrey started his career as software developer earlier. He has participated in different kind projects and this solid background allows him to be involved in Octopus project in 2008. Currently the oldest developer in not so big Octopus team and with team leader role. Andrey likes his project because this is very challenging to develop good software for microfinance area.

Graduated from the CS dept of the Kyrgyz-Russian Slavic University. Ever since Pavel has been developing software for the desktop as well for the web. For about 10 years now. He’s quite good at such programming languages as PHP, C#, JavaScript, and Python. What he really appreciates in the profession is the beauty of the cool hack and the turning of a complicated idea into a simple implementation. He’s been with Octopus for about 2 years now. Pavel was involved into developing frameworks: the reporting framework, the amount stringifier mini-framework, and the consolidation framework he’s working on now.

to come

to come

Ruslan joined Octopus team in January of 2010. Since then he has been working on line of credit, collateral and savings products management, reports development, software localization management and has maintained Octopus continuous integration server. Ruslan graduated from American University of Central Asia with Bachelor of Science degree in Software Engineering in 2007 minoring in Business Administration. He also holds a Master of Business Administation degree from the same university. Ruslan has experience in software development in various fields including applied linguistics and machine translation, web and enterprise software, e-learning software, accounting and finance software development.

Graduated from the Paris Institute of Political Studies (Sciences-Po), Frédéric travelled extensively in numerous countries. In 1989 he settled in Afghanistan where he worked for several International Organisations and assisted the launch of several local NGOs. As co-founder and Development Director of ACTED, Frédéric focuses on constructing integrated and sustainable regional strategies for the organisation’s activities in developing countries. He closely monitored ACTED’s microfinance programs since 1997, and he has played an essential role in the creation and development of the OXUS Group.

Michael is the CEO of OXUS Development Network, which oversees the Octopus project. Michaël graduated from the Bordeaux School of Management in 1999 with a specialization in audit and finance. He started his career with Arthur Andersen in France. In 2003, he moved into the non-profit sector and joined ACTED where he acquired strong experience in the management of projects and organizations in crisis situations. In 2007, after being Finance Director in Afghanistan and Country Director in DRC, he became ACTED’s Regional Director for Africa. He then became Operations Director of MicroCred, a French microfinance operator. He joined the OXUS Group in October 2009 as Chief Executive Director of OXUS Development Network, where he leads the group’s development and supports ACTED and OXUS’ various microfinance initiatives.

Before initiating Octopus, Pierre co-founded, OCTO Technology and IS University, foremost IT forum in France. Pierre is now CIO of Bred Banque Populaire. After Octopus, Pierre also took part of other microfinance ventures, such as Babyloan and is a regular speaking in conferences about microfinance and technologies.

Pierre is not only an entrepreneur but he is also autor of several books about IS policies for companies dealing about lean management, agile methodologies, systems architecture and security.