Switch Software Knows Where the Hours Go

An insurer’s software developers need somewhere to test their work. That does not mean the meter should run at full speed when nobody needs the test environment. At Southbridge Insurance, or SBI, this small distinction became a worthwhile engineering problem. Switch Software reports that adjusting cloud resources to actual demand cut the costs of the non-production environments by 40%, while preserving development performance.

The intervention was straightforward to describe: activate services when needed, reduce consumption during idle periods. Getting it right required understanding the team’s working patterns and protecting its ability to ship software. Switch’s account describes more than 15 people working for SBI across development, testing, design and DevOps. A cheaper test environment would have been a poor bargain if it left them waiting.

That project offers a useful introduction to Switch. The Montevideo company sells custom software development and consulting to organizations across the Americas. Its work lives in the spaces between familiar business activities: buying insurance, approving a payment, updating a supermarket’s product catalog. Those spaces can swallow a remarkable amount of time.

A financial idea, then a services business

The roots were modest and distinctly financial. Universidad ORT Uruguay traces the venture to Álvaro Vázquez and Neri Custodio’s final university project, Cártago, a trading simulation built for a brokerage. The university records entrepreneurial support from Uruguay’s innovation agency, ANII, in 2009.

Nicolás Zangaro joined his university acquaintances to establish Switch in 2009. In a later El País interview, he recalled leaving a senior job with a newborn daughter at home. The founders initially saw an opening among smaller financial businesses, including currency exchanges and brokers. Early commissions also took them into digital television and supermarket purchasing.

The company’s market instincts became more specific. Zangaro described targeting businesses that needed technical talent but struggled to attract the engineers drawn to major technology employers. US commercial offices helped expand its reach. Yet existing Uruguayan customers also drove growth. The opportunity was close enough to visit, as well as large enough to export.

The contract can change when the work does

Switch offers three ways to hire it. End-to-end delivery covers a project from concept through deployment. Staff augmentation supplies specialists who join a client’s own operation. Dedicated teams provide a longer-running group with shared management. These are different answers to a practical question: who will set priorities, supervise the work and carry it forward?

The Ta-Ta supermarket project shows why that distinction matters. Faced with information from more than 1,000 suppliers, the retailer needed relief from repetitive product-data entry. Switch built a portal with separate supplier and administrator modules, connected to existing systems including Oracle and the Manhattan warehouse platform. Suppliers could maintain their own offerings; administrators could review and manage the flow.

After launch, analytics and feedback informed changes to the experience. Four years into implementation, the partners recognized that the application would keep evolving. They changed the engagement to staffing, with Ta-Ta directing priorities and using outside talent as needed. A project that once needed a delivery team had become an ongoing operation. The purchasing arrangement caught up with reality.

First, write down what the bank actually does

For a bank, replacing a core system can disturb everything attached to it. Zenus Bank brought Switch into a migration in September 2023 with a four-month deadline. Transaction validation and international fraud detection were among the critical processes affected. Limited documentation made it harder to establish what the existing application did and what the replacement needed to preserve.

Switch’s testers began by documenting the current application. They then developed test cases and introduced a wider quality process, including workflows for recording, prioritizing, assigning and closing incidents. The company reports that the project went live on schedule with minimal incidents.

The sequence is worth copying. Before accelerating a migration, make the system legible to the people responsible for checking it. Documentation provides something concrete to test against and a shared vocabulary when defects appear. A tight deadline makes that foundation more valuable, even when writing it feels slower than immediately testing the new software.

“They delivered in the agreed time with excellent quality and always added value.”

Nicolás Laass, Ta-Ta
Company-published customer testimonial

AI gets a job in accounts payable

Alchavo, an accounting-services platform, had already digitized much of its operation. Invoice entry remained a manual chore. According to Switch’s case study, earlier attempts at automation had struggled with the variety of invoices and suppliers. The weak point was the messy input arriving at the edge of an otherwise organized system.

Switch built a process in which suppliers email invoices to a designated inbox. Amazon Bedrock models extract fields; validation rules and accounting context help organize the information before it enters Alchavo. High-confidence invoices can be approved automatically. Switch reports more than 2,000 hours freed by the implementation.

BCIE, the Central American development bank, presented a related problem: payment instructions arrived as PDFs and images. Switch used Azure services to bring extracted information into the bank’s portal. Its account identifies separating extraction from interpretation, working in phases and involving stakeholders early as useful design decisions.

These examples suggest a sensible boundary for automation. Reading a document and deciding what its contents authorize are separate responsibilities. Teams considering similar projects should define exception handling and approval ownership alongside extraction accuracy. An unusual invoice or ambiguous instruction still needs somewhere to go.

Sixty-five services have to move together

SBI’s cloud cost work accompanied a larger infrastructure change. Its platform contained 65 interconnected microservices, with message queues and multiple environments to preserve. Switch moved it from its previous setup using Docker Swarm to Kubernetes on Google Cloud, migrating more than 50 gigabytes of data along the way.

The company reports a 90% reduction in production deployment time after the migration. That result concerns the time taken to deploy software; it should not be read as a claim that building software became 90% faster. The migration involved phased execution, validation and changes to the deployment model.

The two SBI stories also illustrate different kinds of improvement. One changes the architecture that carries the software. The other changes how much infrastructure is consumed when development environments are quiet. Buyers can examine both questions separately: is the platform difficult to operate, and are they paying for resources that sit idle?

There is a timesheet rebellion inside the shop

Switch tried the same habit of examining routine work on itself. Its teams use Odoo for activities including project management, expenses and time registration. Navigating screens and repeatedly switching context created administrative friction. Inconsistent records also complicated billing, cost allocation and visibility into project profitability.

The company built AlpOdoo, an interface that lets employees issue natural-language commands through Slack and connects those requests to Odoo. Its reported results include a 40% reduction in the average time needed for time entries and more than 2,800 productive hours recovered annually. Switch estimates annual operational savings of $80,000.

That dollar figure is an internal estimate of operational value. It is useful as an indication of how Switch evaluates its own work, rather than a price tag for buying the tool. The narrow initial focus on entering and consulting time records makes the experiment particularly readable: one recurring annoyance, one defined workflow, an outcome the company can count.

What a buyer is actually buying

The commercial proposition is access to people and delivery capability. Switch organizes expertise into studios covering engineering, UX, mobile, data and AI, cloud and DevOps, testing, cybersecurity, ServiceNow and support. That range lets a client add a specialist or assemble a broader team without treating every discipline as a separate procurement exercise.

Its Verifone relationship began in 2015 around demand for Java and Angular talent. The published work includes payment gateway development, APIs and a merchant portal migration. BBVA’s relationship dates to 2010; an online-banking renewal involved architecture, channels and extensive testing. These are assignments where knowledge of the client’s systems can remain useful across successive projects.

The alternative might be recruiting permanent employees, hiring individual contractors or engaging a larger consultancy. Switch’s position rests on a combination of nearshore access, specialist support and continuity. Its website reports average client partnerships exceeding six years. Buyers should test that promise in interviews with the proposed team and in references for comparable work.

Clutch lists a $50,000 minimum project size and an advertised hourly range of $25-$49. A consulting client interviewed in March 2025 reported spending more than $500,000 since November 2023. Those figures describe different scopes and durations, rather than a universal tariff. They place the conversation firmly in business-software budgets.

The relationship needs operating rules

Clutch’s review summary praises communication but also identifies room to improve early scoping and delivery estimates. That combination is instructive. A pleasant team can still need a more precise brief. A buyer should agree on acceptance criteria, decision-making authority and how scope changes affect the schedule before committing to a substantial build.

Switch’s culture language emphasizes openness, training and shared asados. In October 2025, it announced Great Place To Work certification and said 89% of employees regarded it as a great workplace. In July 2026, it announced ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification following a UNIT audit. Its account describes roughly 18 months of work to formalize security practices.

There is a practical limit to the SBI cost lesson: environments with little idle capacity offer less room for that particular saving. Likewise, staff augmentation requires someone on the client side who can direct the work. These are choices about operating conditions, not simply a preference for outsourcing.

Switch’s August 2026 writing on stalled AI pilots argues for a quantified business case, realistic production conditions and a named owner. That is a useful brief to bring to Switch itself. Arrive with a costly process, establish what happens today, and agree on what a better version would measure. The invoice inbox, the test environment and the timesheet are all reasonable places to start.