Meet The Team
Vladimir Kostov, Chairman & CEO – Born April 26, 1968 and graduated from Mathematical and Fundamental Sciences School Targovishte in 1986 with degree in Computer Science and Sofia Technical University in 2000 with Master’s degree of Computer Technologies and Management.
He started his career as Financial analyst and advisor for several information agencies, insurance companies and Securities and Stock Exchange Commission, but the list of his clients includes Framligton Bulgaria Fund, HSBC (CCF) and various clients regarding investments in Bulgarian Stock Exchange market and privatization procedures of the Bulgarian state monopolies – Bulgartabac, Electro Distribution Companies, Thermo plants, Heating Companies in Sofia, Plovdiv and Varna. Before joining OPENINTEGRA he was also a Member of the Board of Directors of Balkan Utilities Consortium and CEO of Balkan Water, McCup Holding and Stancioff, Sevlievski & Co. (SSCO).
Vladimir joined OPENINTEGRA in 2005 as Managing partner and has been immediately promoted as Chairman and CEO of the new company (after the acquisition of ATIA NET), acting also as Financial manager.
He loves to play tennis in his spare time and also loves horses and horse riding as a hobby.
Stoyan Mishinev, VP Technical Operations & Infrastructure – Born July 31st, 1971 in Plovdiv. He finished the Exemplary Mathematical Secondary School in Plovdiv, furnished with impressive knowledge in the sphere of laser equipment and technologies, and installation and tuning of optico-mechanical and optico-electronic devices. Further he studied at the Sofia Technical University, and in 2000 graduated with a Master’s degree in Telecommunication Engineering and Technology, specialized in Optical and Mobile Communications. While at university, he worked as a network specialist in a local cable TV, occupied in the design and building of cable networks for television and radio signal re-transmission.
In the far 1997 he was employed by Digital Systems – Plovdiv branch where till 2001 he was doing the design and building of internet transmission networks and radio-relay systems. He was appointed Regional Manager for the Plovdiv region and held that position until 2009; also a co-founder of OPENINTEGRA.
He has excellent knowledge of UNIX and Unix-like systems; an inveterate BSD hacker, on whose desktop less than six consoles have never been seen by a living man.
His free time he spends shooting, and mostly processing the pictures. Though maybe the perfectionism in his professional performance is not obvious to the majority of people, who can hardly pronounce even the terms he uses, that same perfectionism is so apparent to everyone in his photographies. Stoyan is that sort of a man who would drive back 30 km just to take a picture of the beautiful landscape which has impressed him.
Yovko Lambrev, VP Sales and Business Development – Born May 8, 1974 in Plovdiv, Bulgaria. Co-founder of OPENINTEGRA, entrepreneur and famous Bulgarian blogger, technical writer and visionary. He wrote his first bit of software when he was nine, and though strange as it may seem against his age he has been part of the industry for more than a quarter of a century now. He graduated from Plovdiv Exemplary Mathematical Secondary School in 1992 with subject Mathematics and Sofia Technical University in 1997 with Master’s degree of Telecommunications. He started his enterprise career as System manager at Unicredit (ex-Hebrosbank) and also worked three years for Siemens and seven years for IBM.
His experience with the hi-tech giants and clients like Coca Cola HBC, Mobiltel, Bulgarian Telecommunication Company (now Vivacom), DSK bank, First Investment Bank, Raiffeisen Bank, Societe Generale, Telerik and many others have given him tremendous strategic, technical and industry insight as well as unparalleled knowledge and understanding of the whole IT industry.
He is founder and chairman of Open Projects Foundation and ex-member of Free Software Association – Bulgaria management board and the Bulgarian President’s Nominee Committee for the John Atanasoff Award. He is the father of the biggest bulgarian open source and free software conference – Openfest. Being heavy open source and free culture believer and technology evangelist, he is an author of uncountable publications and papers. In 2004 PC Magazine Bulgaria has awarded him as IT Person of the Year for his open source and innovative initiatives.
Photography is his passion and hobby as he is also professional freelance photographer in his spare time. He also lives on the Internet at least half of his life. More: http://yovko.net | http://simplestudio.org | twitter
Zdravko Zdravkov, VP Research & Development – the most artistic among IT entrepreneurs and OPENINTEGRA founders. System integrator of business solutions based on the networking technologies and open source software. Making his first steps with user interfaces and web development, he then passionately jumped into the field of infrastructure solutions.
His professional history includes CTO for Rambler.bg, project manager for ATIA web development, member of the jury of bgsite.org.
Diploma in woodcarving at Art school in Tryavna and master degree in children environment design at National Art Academy, Sofia. While a student at Art Academy, fortune meets him with the free and easy company of IT people. He absorbs key IT knowledge and remains in the field.
Activist for business with a human face and software freedom supporter. Place of residence – Internet.
Vesselin Kolev, Ph.D., Security and Infrastructure Consultant – He has worked for the Division of Network and Communications at Sofia University Computing Center for more than five years and he is part of OPENINTEGRA’s team since 2004. Because of his personal efforts University of Sofia is the first university in Bulgaria that has delegated its own IPv6 space. His spheres of interest are also networking and infrastructure security, cryptography, encryption methods, digitally signing, DNS, DNSSEC, routing protocols, Linux-based solutions and services.
He is also great trainer and technical writer. More: http://vesselin.org/
Vladislav Rusanov, System Engineer – Born June 20th, 1986 in Nikopol, spent his high-school years in Pleven and then studied Power Engineering at the Technical University, Sofia.
In 2005, assisted by Zdravko Zdravkov he could experience the power of the console, and after that he became a devoted disciple of Vesselin Kolev who helped him gain notable control over the Machine. He, quite naturally, became Veselin Kolev’s right hand. Since then he has been irrevocably using Fedora as a working environment, and the servers he is in charge of operate basically on CentOS or RHEL, however no system has overpowered him yet. He hacks anything subject to disassembling. Besides, Vladi is a valuable staff member of the Sofia University Computer Center, where he deals mainly with routing. In this regard, and not without the influence of Vesselin Kolev, he is a real proponent of IPv6.
If he had a pet dog, he undoubtedly would call it Bash – further comment is hardly needed! Today, though the youngest member of the OPENINTEGRA team, he can, with his eyes closed, control virtual machines and certificate authorities, build and administer e-mail, DNS and hosting services. Gained experience and skills, pertinent to a few in this trade, trained by the best professionals, now himself one of them, Vladi is a loved and esteemed person by the OPENINTEGRA programmers staff, always ready to help whenever his staff mates encounter the immense vastness of the operating system.
As before mentioned, he is keen on hacking anything that may be disassembled, so not surprisingly he spends his free time on cars and all sorts of motor sports. He finds equal pleasure in both disassembling and controlling them, just like it is with the computers.
Pavel Zhelyazkov, Software Developer – a public programmer, taking interest in computer composing, computer graphics, and anything else with algorithm in it – lolling, cooking, traditional and unconventional culinary feasting. Since recently – a licensed driver. Keen on wires, too.
The term “diskette” sneaked into his mind yet nursery school. At that time in the computer world the audio cassette was still widely at use as a data storage. A year later he wrote his first program in BASIC! Later on he reached considerable progress.
In 2001 he met part of what was going to become the OPENINTEGRA team, and began his personal development in the sphere of WEB services, which certainly was a stage of new expression for Pavel.
In the following years he contributed to a number of projects, among which small console tools in Perl and C, followed by the low-level programming language, assembler, reaching to the large projects in different branches of the home and across-border trades like on-line shops (topvision), systems for on-line insurance (dzi-insurance), statistic analyses systems (focus-election), on-line guides (bulgaria-vr), etc.
In August 2008 he joined the OPENINTEGRA “A” team, commencing projects of even greater scope for one of our clients – Mobiltel: Business SMS portal (bSMS), a number of cell phone applications for WAP access, Vodafone live and developments for iPhone.
Ivan Ivanov, Software Developer – the young hope of the OPENINTEGRA team. Early realizing that universal solutions do not exist, he approaches each issue in a unique way, always searching for the most efficient solution, and not the most familiar one. A rare blend of a back-end programmer with a sense of front-end design. He likes relaxing while “arranging boxes” with CSS.
His real passion is the human language processing. The curious combination of an IT specialist with a linguistic background has taken him into the deep forest of the creation and annotating of text corpora, morphological analyzers, revealing of the secrets and controlling the specificities typical for the generation and support of electronic glossaries….. that sort of things we don’t like to be up to 
He is deeply interested in “user interface”, a term so widely used. Occupied with the creation of the user interface ideology of ultimately diverse projects, he happens to know what a vast jungle of unique issues is hidden behind those two simple words. That also makes him realize how important the intense and permanent communication with the clients and users of the project system is. He believes the programmer’s highest priority is the optimizing of application from the users’ view point, because our aim is making people happy, not complicating matters. All the rest are just details, centered around that notion.
He loves his job because of the ceaseless challenges, the complete absence of the idea of boredom and the constant self-improvement, going on somehow in between.
Georgi Zhelyazkov, Software Developer -
Evgeni Dimitrov, Software Developer -
Petar Ivanov, Software Developer -