WESTBOROUGH, Mass., – (July 10, 2014) – Virtusa Corporation (NASDAQ: VRTU), a global business consulting and IT outsourcing company that combines innovation, technology leadership and industry solutions to transform the customer experience, received recognition in a recent Everest Group report for its innovative Software Development Productivity and Right First Time solution, ERA Insight, and Employee Engagement and Gamification platform, V+. Everest Group, a leading global management consulting firm that advises business leaders on the next generation of global services, cited Virtusa’s solutions in its May 2014 report: “In Search of ADM Productivity.”
Virtusa was recognized by Everest Group for creating solutions that demystify software development productivity and quality at the individual engineer level, gamify personal excellence for Millennial engineers and offer deep insights for software product value appreciation. The Everest Group report noted Virtusa’s innovative use of tooling to measure aspects such as developer productivity, technical debt and reuse as well as gamification to drive employee engagement, playing to the “human instincts of competition, achievement and recognition.” The report specifically mentions ERA Insight, Virtusa’s Right First time and Productivity Governance Solution used to drive personal excellence among developers, and V+, an award-winning Millennial engagement platform that incorporates social media artifacts such as individual websites, internal social networks and daily leader boards highlighting top performing teams, to drive employee engagement and collaboration. Virtusa’s approach has delivered “impressive results,” including a 97 percent reduction in defects, a 45 percent reduction in customer order creation time and a 14 percent increase in cost savings in various client engagements Virtusa has been involved in.
“Virtusa has developed a robust approach for productivity enhancement that is particularly helpful for organizations with complex multi-vendor outsourcing environments,” said Chirajeet Sengupta, practice director at Everest Group. “By combining top down central governance with bottom up engagement of employees using tactics like gamification, enterprises can drive positive productivity improvements.”
Virtusa’s ERA Insight solution measures and provides visibility to aspects such as developer productivity, technical debt, architecture and reuse, all of which are critical for creating a high performance software development culture. In combination with Virtusa’s internal social business platform, V+, ERA Insight effectively leverages its powerful personal excellence features to tap the potential of the company’s Millennial workforce. Since the implementation of ERA Insight and V+, Virtusa has seen productivity improvements, better collaboration among team members, improved team morale, and a rise in revenues through client innovations.
“IT buyers are becoming increasingly frustrated by their inability to measure and improve productivity across software development initiatives, and the increasing pressure to bring down costs is met by cutting corners, resulting in even more painful consequences later on,” said Chandika Mendis, senior vice president and global head of Engineering, Virtusa. “Our new approach, which capitalizes on our longstanding product engineering heritage, tackles this challenge head on by providing the means to measure previously hidden aspects such as technical debt and productivity from the developer upwards, driving strong ownership and engagement. We are honored that Everest Group recognized our leadership in its recent report.”
As labor arbitrage for Application Outsourcing (AO) reaches its limits, enterprise customers must look for the next avenue of value creation, and the most compelling route is driving higher productivity with their Application Development and Maintenance (ADM) portfolios. But, issues with identifying drivers of productivity and metrics that measure outcomes, prioritizing initiatives and establishing best practices, and driving adoption across the enterprise, hinder productivity improvement efforts. Virtusa’s approach helps IT departments realize the importance of disruptive thinking, complemented by effective tooling to drive efficiencies into the software development process. Virtusa’s productivity approach encourages organizations to couple their traditional software development metrics with metrics that provide early indications of any accumulation of technical debt, as well as reuse and productivity.
As a company whose workforce is 86 percent Millennial, Virtusa has made it a top priority to create an environment that not only retains Millennial employees, but also engages and empowers them to do their best work.