Industrial Visit to Virtusa

Company Profile:

Figure 1: Virtusa Logo

Virtusa Corporation is a global information technology (IT) services company providing IT consulting, technology and outsourcing services. Global 2000 companies and the leading software vendors in Communications & Technology, Banking & Financial Services, Insurance, Telecommunications, and Media, Information & Entertainment industries. They build and sustain application platforms for their clients that create competitive advantage. Founded in 1996 and headquartered in Massachusetts, beside that they operates offices and technology centers throughout the United States, Europe and Asia.

Company Introduction and its Framework:

After visiting to the company in Virtusa New Building Auditorium, students had a brief introduction from graduated students who are currently employe in Virtusa and they explained About the company, working experience and the positive outcomes that gained after engaging with this company.

Figure 2: Mr. Shehan Warusavithana

Then after friendly discussion with them, the program headed by Mr. Shehan Warusavithana that shown in Figure 2 who is currently the director in technology at Virtusa. At the stating point of the presentation Mr. Shehan mentioned that he joined as a software architect in 2003 to Virtusa and before that he worked as a software consultant for JP Morgan Chase (US) during 2003 - 2007 (4 years). During that time he was part of the team that built the largest online banking system in the world which received him the ultimate industrial experience that ever can expose during the career. Then Mr. Shehan driven the discussion back to the company and stated below artifacts,

About Virtusa:

• US company - Headquarters -Westborough, Massachusetts, USA
• Offices -Throughout US, Europe and Asia 
• Technology Centers -US, UK, Hungary, India and Sri Lanka
• Number of Professionals - Over 5840
• 89 active clients that give significant amount of business; almost millions of dollars.
• Listed on NASDAQ (VRTU) - US Stock Market
• Revenue for the year 2012 is $277.8 and for this year (2012) $330 million is being expected.
• The revenue target for the year 2015 is $500 million and for the year 2018 is $1 billion. These targets are achievable because Virtusa has the skills and professional that they can actually deliver those targets.

Value Proposition:

 

To show innovation, creativity and efficiency into the work done and save money in the process.

Customers:

• Financial : Standard Chartered, Pay Pal, New York Life, Cardiff, JP Morgan Chase & Co.
• Media and Communication: Cisco Systems, Qwest.
• Technology: Harte Hanks Trilluum Software, HC Pro, Datacert, Pego.
• Media: Thomson Reuters, Iron Mountain, National Gepgraphic.

Awards & Recognition:

• HRM gold award - Corporate Research Foundation (CRF) Institute
• Boston Globe Award - Virtusa was ranked 42 in The Boston Globe’s Globe 100 List
• Forbes' list of the "100 Best Small Public Companies in America.

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Activities:  

Virtusa's Corporate Social Responsibly programme is embodied in three key initiatives. They are,

• Digital Research Initiative - Set up an information system IT labs in rural areas.
• Campus Reach Initiative - Provided 21000 campus training.
• Code Green
• Supported National Integration - Rehabilitation of ex-LTTE combatants.

Domain Expertise:

• Sectors that Virtusa mostly cater and generate revenues
• Telecom: 30% revenue
  Banking and Financial: 58% - 60% revenue
• Insurance
• Healthcare - Sated as the recently growing sector
• Media and Entertainment

Main Projects done by Virtusa:

• Telecom Fault Management System for British Telecom
• E-Gateway for ICTA
• Tracking life cycle of aircraft components for Pratt & Whitney by using .net.
• Cheque scanning and depositing system for JP Morgan Chase & Co.

Ongoing Major Projects:

• A fall tracker for patients and old-aged people for Philips Montreal Project

Companies Training Programs:

• On boarding
• Personal engineering excellence
• Technical skills
• Soft skills
• Team Building

Knowledge Management and Collaboration:

Maintaining a portal like Social Media

     -Yommer

     -Vingo

     -vT

     -vTube

Compensation and Benefits:

• Basic salary
• Motor car allowance
• Quarterly bonus
• Facilities like Dinner, Transport after hours, Gym, Pool tables.

Figure 3: Mr. Shiham Nawaz

After that the discussion handed over to Mr. Shiham Nawaz shown in Figure 3 discuss about BPM practice done at Virtusa.

Mr. Shiham started his presentation by stating that BPM stands for Business Process Management and can be defined as an umbrella term that describes the methodologies, metrics, processes and systems used to monitor as well as to manage an enterprise's business performance.

Figure 4: Basic Project Management Triangle

Mr.Shiham then explained that BPM revolves around engineers in the business process by participating Business Analysts, Architects, Managers. There is a high demand for Engineers from all the aspects in BPM since many companies moving their tradition business process to automation as well as Harding and enhancing the current system in order to cater ever growing business needs. BPM engineers need to have a basic knowledge about other BPM processors since they work as team to deliver the end product what client acquired for. Beside that Mr.Shiham noted for BIT students they can start their career path through Business Analyst where the role's main responsibility is to act as the interface between client and the programmers basically to identify the customer needs and arrange necessities in a way that convenient to programmers. The main objective of BPM is to business process re-engineering basically automating the process involves to reduce the cost and time as well as enhancing the quality. This made possible since Virtusa currently dealing with 5th generation languages ex:- Pega Platform.

BPM adds Value to the followings:

• Adds Value to Customer
• Adds Value to Customer's Customer
• Adds Value to Employees

How BPM supports to Project Team:

• Separates business logic from technical aspects
• Exposes another layer for business functionalities
• Brings business domain knowledge by analyzing and modelling
• Brings technology knowledge by architecture and design

Virtusa evaluate it performance through Time, Cost, Quality, Customer orientation, Employee orientation and through Work Culture of the organization.

Before concluding the BPM session, Mr.Shiham stated that BPM practice employs close to 10% of the total Virtusa headcount and its revenues contributes to 25% of the total organizational revenue. Currently Virtusa serves to 31 accounts and nearly 100 individual clients that widespread globally who retain and continuously acquire for company's services.

After that students headed to discussion board room in the intention to expose students to real working environment basically to observe how project steps were executed within Virtusa. Students were exposed to a project that Virusa currently working on named as Philips Montreal. The main purpose of this project is to develop a fall tracking software to the Philips that enables them to track and provide further services in a blinking eye by linkage with medical service to subscribed old aged people when they met with accidents.

Students were addressed by members of the project team and they started off by briefing the project scope. According to them this project is done for the healthcare domain of Philips. The reason why Virtusa received this project is because Virtusa has already completed many Philips project successfully because of that they gained strong client relationship and they pioneer in proving services for healthcare domain.

Figure 5: Philips Montreal Project Team (Virtusa)

Then the Project team shown in Figure 5 explained their main requirement gathering method as Workshops (Hot Houses). Hot Houses means where development company and the Client book an official place for some days to interact with each other on purpose to gather requirements from the client's representatives directly. Since this process involves many arguments and discussions it named as "Hot House". The main advantage of a Hot House is, it enables development company to identify and gather necessary requirements within a short period of time than other requirement gathering method.

Then they driven the session to project scheduling, basically the project execution plan. They stated that they used an iterative model as it is easier to get feedback then and there and enables to do change accordingly depending on the clients preferences. Along with above facts they mentioned that they have been used many number of use cases in each stage of the execution plan. As depicted by presentation slide in the first stage they started off with 2 use cases, in the second stage 12 use cases and then in the final stage there were 31 use cases. Although this project completed up to some extent, project team mention its not efficient to keep many use cases at the end stage of a project since there is no way to get client's feedback for them as well as it may results some errors in the final product.         

After explaining about the Philips Montreal Project, Project team stated the development process that involved in any project environment. This list filed up as,

• Architecture Level : Discusses about the Technology, Maintainability, Scalability
• Design Level : Discusses what are the interfaces and software components
• Low Level Design (LLD) : Designing use cases and coup with little coding
• Development: Checking the quality of work done by peer review and lead review
• Quality Assurance
• Tracking Risk issues and Mitigation issues

Before finishing off the session project team stated in order to do projects like Philips Montreal Virtusa use PEGA platform that build on J2EE framework. The real benefit by using above mention platform is it reduces the time taken to complete a project since it enables many professionals in different specified areas to engage on the same project as well as it generates most of the required code for software implementation based on the functions that provided to the platform.

Industrial Visit Outcomes:

Before visiting to the Virtusa I heard that they are the Sri Lanka's Best IT Solution company. They promote their career vacancies through various online websites with attractive banner ad's because of that I was bit aware of the company services before I go there. Some of the news that I heard about the company was not good up to some extend specially on the salary provided for the employees. But I was able to learn the true side of the Virtusa and how its cater to clients by utilizing the employees capabilities by shaping them to organization culture. During the sessions that conducted by various representatives from Virtusa enabled me to learn areas such as new requirement gathering methods as an example "Hot Houses" and the session on BPM open me an area of new phenomenal to study on since business processors engaging with new technologies to coup with ever growing business needs. In the industrial level project were executed in a systematic where every each and every expertise in relevant area can contribute to the project without any interference and to keep the project always on going some team members were send to on shore locations where other members were stayed back off shore since to overcome communication barriers and huge time difference. I understood that the project that we carry out during academic career were totally lies in foundation/basic phase when comparing with industrial level projects that carries out by companies like Virtusa and it deals with many professionals along with their ideas to finally output a client satisfied product since the client stated to be the king and company deals with peoples money not with marks as we get in academic life. I hope my practicality will benefit more on me in industrial level since that my theoretical knowledge will provide me the gateway for it.