Head of Software and Image Development
What truly makes a collaboration last? That's the question we wanted to ask our client Trixell, who has trusted us for over 15 years now. Beyond the simple contract that binds us, how does a vendor–supplier relationship evolve into a partnership where each team becomes an extension of the other?
We sat down with Claude Pettinato, Head of Software and Image Development, and Julien Braque, Director of Professional Services at Witekio, for a joint conversation about what has made this partnership both possible and enduring.
While the story of Witekio and Trixell began over 15 years ago, it was in 2019 that Trixell decided to formalize the partnership. That decision marked a genuine strategic turning point for Trixell's technical teams. “We completely changed our approach,” sums up Claude Pettinato.
Bringing in an external partner is a strategic choice that raises questions for the entire team structure: what role does that partner play? How do you preserve internal sovereignty? How do you ensure that in-house teams remain capable of understanding, challenging, and taking back control?
For Trixell, one golden rule: share a common foundation of expertise and knowledge to stay in a position to challenge the external partner.
“We need to understand what we’re doing. Not to be experts instead of Witekio, but to have enough knowledge to challenge.” — Claude Pettinato, Trixell
At Witekio, client sovereignty is not just a matter of principle. It is embedded in day-to-day practices:
As Julien Braque puts it: “The idea is that if Trixell ever wants to work differently, they have everything they need right at hand. This isn’t a commercial stance, it’s a conviction.”
This commitment to documentation and knowledge transfer serves a dual purpose: preserving client independence and supporting continuous skill development within the teams.
An RFP evaluates what a vendor can do today. Choosing the right partner means evaluating what they’ll be capable of tomorrow. That distinction guided Trixell’s decision to work with Witekio, and continues to shape their collaboration.
“We were aiming beyond Linux from the start. It was the breadth and complementarity of Witekio’s expertise that convinced us,” recalls Claude Pettinato. Events have proven him right. On top of the Linux expertise originally sought, the scope expanded to include maintenance, CVE vulnerability detection, and hardware module testing and qualification. The partnership grew because the trust was already there.
Claude and Julien both describe this forward momentum through a recent example that captures how the relationship has evolved: a workshop held this year at Trixell’s premises, outside of any specific project context, focused on trends in embedded technology. For Julien Braque, that moment carries real weight: “It was an additional step forward. We’re shifting toward something broader, more open.”
When two teams start building together beyond the projects that brought them together, it’s a sign the relationship has reached a new dimension, and an invitation to go even further.
In any professional relationship, longevity doesn’t happen on its own. It has to be built. What Trixell and Witekio have created rests on three mutually reinforcing pillars.
Trixell’s standards are real, and Witekio’s teams don’t shy away from saying so. On the contrary, they’ve taken them on as a baseline, for instance:
This discipline generates effects that reach well beyond the project itself. Tools developed to meet Trixell’s requirements, like the vulnerability scanner originally built for this engagement, are now used across other Witekio projects. “We have a continuous integration pipeline that runs overnight and produces reports we analyze every morning to catch CVEs, so we can alert Trixell as quickly as possible and offer them the best solution,” explains Julien Braque.
So one client’s high standards become an accelerator for an entire organization. “This is a project we often cite internally as an example of what we do at our best, when we check every box for good practice,” Julien adds.
Few partnerships go without friction. At Trixell and Witekio, one principle emerged naturally: nothing gets bottled up, things are said directly.
“With Julien, we’d get in touch the moment there was a problem. When that happened, it was a phone call, either him to me or me to him. We’ve always found a solution.” — Claude Pettinato, Trixell
Julien Braque shares the same conviction: “You see the true nature of a partnership in how you handle problems.”
In practice, this translates into:
“When something is really stuck, we can be in the same room within a few hours,” Julien Braque notes. Simple practices, but ones that make all the difference over the long haul.
Fifteen years of collaboration means a succession of assessments, adjustments, and recalibrations. At Witekio, continuous improvement takes the form of concrete rituals. As Julien Braque describes it: “We held regular retrospectives, identified bottlenecks, areas where we weren’t at our best, small communication gaps on one side or the other. We put actions in place, followed up on them, and tracked them over time. And things kept getting better.”
These adjustments extend to team organization as well. “When the budget only allows for one person, it’s often better to have two at half-time. That way, there are always two engineers who can talk to each other and push back on each other,” explains Julien Braque. A simple logic born from field experience, and now a project standard.
On Trixell’s side, this drive for improvement shows up as a constant determination to get the most out of every process and every component, to get to the bottom of things, even when the answers are hard to find. A mindset that naturally pushes both teams to raise their game.
What has this partnership actually brought to the teams involved?
At Witekio, team members who work on Trixell projects come away trained to a level of rigor that few environments demand. “Anyone who’s worked on this project comes out trained in documentation discipline and in the standards we have to uphold. And I’ve seen it firsthand: that rigor, they replicate it on other projects,” says Julien Braque. A senior profile kept on the same project for two and a half years, driven by the depth and variety of topics covered, for Julien, that’s one of the clearest signs of what makes this collaboration exceptional.
On Trixell’s side, the impact is also human. Being able to rely on a trusted external team takes pressure off internal resources and lets them focus on their core value-add. “It allowed him to lean on people he trusts,” says Claude Pettinato simply, speaking of his internal team.
This conversation reminds us that a lasting partnership is never the result of chance. It’s the outcome of a conscious, repeated choice: communicating honestly, challenging each other, and treating difficulties as opportunities for improvement. In short: moving forward together.
