An interview with Raja Neravati, Vice President, Enterprise Accounts, AppLabs
“As the world’s largest software testing and quality management service provider, we are defining new solutions and techniques to meet the enterprise customer needs.”
1. Few years ago Independent Testing was a good go-to-market strategy. Now most organizations have setup an independent testing practice. What challenges do you see for AppLabs’s growth in this kind of environment?
Independent Testing is just one of the factors for AppLabs’s continued success. The true differentiating factor is our “Thought Leadership”. I have seen many enterprise organizations approaching specialists for niche areas like Quality Assurance, instead of going with generalists because specialists provide more focus and attention. As the world’s largest software testing and quality management service provider, we are defining new solutions and techniques to meet the enterprise customer needs. Some of our innovations like factory approach for automation and web service test case generator have accelerated the test efforts and helped enterprises around the globe in lowering QA and maintenance costs and enabling tighter alignment of IT with business objectives. So Focus, Innovation and Thought Leadership will be the true differentiator and secret sauce to our business growth.
2. As VP for Enterprise Accounts, you are managing some of the largest clients at AppLabs. How do you see AppLabs’s positioning and future growth compared to other leading players?
Having multiple players involved, Enterprise client environment becomes extremely complex and challenging. Everyone competes to establish their footprint and grow along with the customer. In addition to multiple players, we have to compete on heterogeneous technology footprint and must have the ability to ramp up in a short span. I find this space very dynamic and exciting with a lot of action and surprises. It helps us to be on our toes and never leaves room to become complacent. So while it is adventurous to be in such market place, I believe it is also important to build a strong story for a long term stint. We uniquely position ourselves to report quality without any bias and automatically become the trusted source for project sponsors. When engaged with generalists, enterprise clients often run into a problem of managing the conflict of interest and sanity of information published. This is because each vendor tries to put others in bad light to compete for the overall business (development and testing). However, with our focus on Independent Testing, there is no conflict of interest and we naturally become a trusted partner for clients. This trust helps us to grow and sustain long term partnerships in the enterprise space.
3. AppLabs recently launched SCORE framework for delivering Test Center of Excellence (TCoE). What are the business drivers for this new framework?
Over the last few years, customers have recognized the importance and need for Independent Testing and have engaged AppLabs to deliver services like Functional Testing, Automation and Performance Testing. These quality initiatives were mostly for individual projects or to resolve a specific business problem. While this approach helped resolve the problem at hand, it was not scalable and could not meet the overall organization needs in terms of cost savings, reusability and improving time to market. In enterprise organizations, this approach posed even bigger problems like usage of multiple tools, lack of standardization and consistency in delivery. AppLabs being a leader in Quality Assurance (QA), conducted analysis and market research about this challenge and validated the business case with several ‘C” level executives. Thus was born SCORE. We created SCORE methodology comprising of proven methodologies, tools and templates as a response to this business challenge. SCORE has a practical approach of transforming QA, organization-wide with phased implementation and checkpoints to validate the progress. This framework is helping us deliver TCoE – Test Center of Excellence, services while realizing customer goals including reducing time to market and overall costs, much faster than the traditional approach. Since the launch of SCORE, we see almost 8 out of 10 customers opting for this approach and realizing its benefits.
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“The stability and reliability of our trading platform is paramount to our success. We rely on AppLabs to verify that new software we develop meets MarketAxess' strict acceptance criteria for quality. AppLabs has been our trusted partner as we have grown. They combine an excellent offshore delivery model with an active onsite management component to make sure our testing needs are met. Their CMMI Level 5 rating underscores the quality and strength of AppLabs management and staff.”
Chief Technology Officer, MarketAxess
