Day 26-Industrial Tour to Virtusa

Company Profile

Figure 1: Logo of Virtusa(neccfoundersgolf,2012)

Virtusa is a large Information Technology (IT) company founded in 1996 in Massachusetts. Virtusa is a company which provides IT consultation, technology and out sourcing. Virtusa caters customers from different industries/fields. Virtusa has customers from banking and financial services, insurance, telecommunication and from many other fields. 

Introduction of the Company

After visiting to the company, all the students gathered to a hall. Before starting presentations two past APIIT students came and gave a brief introduction to Virtusa,what they are doing, what they have experienced and what they have gained in their career.

Figure 2:  Mr. Shehan Warusavithana  (Facebook, 2012)

After that it came time for the main presentations. First presentation was done by Mr. Shehan Warusavithana. Before discuss about Virtusa , Mr. Shehan gave a brief introduction about himself. Currently Mr. Shehan is a director in technology in Virtusa. He has joint Virtusa as a software architect and has given a good service to the company with the knowledge and experiences that he gained nearly for nine years. Then he started the discussion about Virtusa.

Virtusa

• US company
• Virtusa has main off shores. They are Sri Lanka, India and US
• 5650 world class professionals
• 89 active clients who are giving millions worth projects.
• Listed on NASDAQ (US stock market)
• FY 2012 Revenue: $ 277.8 million
• Operating income: $ 23.9 million
• 10 years revenue CAGR (Compound And Growth Rate): 32.47%

Industries in Companies (Clients)

• Financial- Citi bank, BFSI, J P Morgan and Chase & Co., Paypal
• Media and Information- National geographic, Thomson Reuters
• Communication- CISCO, Qwest
• Technology- Pego, United technology, IBM
• Health care and life science- Blue Cross, Carolina
• Others- McDonald

Awards

• Steve Award For Human Resource
• HRM (Human Resource Management) Award in 2010
• Agile Awards
• Boston Gold Award

Responsible Corporate Organization

Virtusa has engaged into social service activities

• Developed 75 IT labs in rural areas
• Over 120,000 campus students has gained benefits from the training
• Supported national integration  - Rehabilitation of ex-LTTE combatants
•  "Akura" school management system
• Founding contributes to "Sahana" in the after month of the 2004 Tsunami.

Domain Expertise

• Telecom- 30% revenue
• Banking and financial 60% revenue (approximately)
• Insurance - Growing rapidly
•  Heath care- Growing rapidly
• Media and entertainment

Projects handled by Virtusa

Below has mentioned some of the main projects handled by virtusa.

• E-gateway system for British telecom
• Help track the life cycle of air craft components for Pratt and Whitney
• Cheques scanning and depositing system for J P Morgan and Chase

Current Projects handle by Virtusa

• A fall tracker for patients and old people for Philips

Companies Training Programs

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

Career and Growth

• Learning environment
• Mentor and buddy system
• Maintaining portals like social media- vT, vTube, Vinger

Benefits that Employees get from Virtuse

• Basic Salary
• Car Allowances
• Quarterly bonus
• Parties
• Entertainment clubs etc.

After the very descriptive introduction of the Virtusa Mr. Shiham Nawaz started a new discussion about BPM practices that carries in Virtusa.

Figure 3:  Mr. Shiham Nawaz(Face book, 2012)

BPM stands for Business Process Management. BPM has come to the industry with the changes of the business. Early days mainly focus on the business now it has changed and now focus on the customers and employees by adding quality and reducing the cost of the product. This is all about BPM.

According to Mr. Nawaz, When discuss about BPM, BPM engineers are the ones who are done the main role in this. There is a high demand for the engineers, from this technology adds demand on the engineers because of that different versions will be invented in different programming languages. Which means everything (all the process) include in working environment is automated which called 5th generation and Mr Nawaz stated Virtusa follows 5th generation which they use a software called "PEGA". It works as a portal. In PEGA discussions,chat and other communication processed included which is useful for interaction among employees when handling a project.  Mr Nawaz stated for BIT students it is good to start the career as a business analyst which is the role of act between client and the programmer and identify the customer requirements and inform the programmer. Mr Nawaz said because of that it will be useful if a business analyst has the basic knowledge about coding which will help to explain customer requirements to the programmer. BPM mainly focus on the business quadrant.  The performance of evaluation done in Virtusa based on following factors. They are, time, cost, quality and customer orientation.

Entities of BPM

BPM adds value to,

• Customers
• Customers' customers
• Employee

BPM helps Project team for,

• 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 

After the effective discussion about BPM students were taken to the board room to give the experience of how the Virtusa handles projects. For explain about working environment of projects they use their current project of A fall tracker for patients and old people for Philips which is currently in the process of implementation. 

The discussion started by the project manger of the Philips project. The project manager started the lecture by stating the information gathering tool use to this project. The tool was work shops which also known as hot houses. Hot houses is techniques which process, clients and the development team gather to an official place for a particular time period (it can be hours or few days) and discuss and gather customer/client requirements in-order to implement the system. The main benefit of hot houses is development team able to capture customer requirements within a very short period of time when compare to other fact finding techniques.

Figure 4: Project members of Philips Project

After that project manger showed the project work flow or the project plan of the project. In the project plan there were three stages. First stage include 2 use-cases, second stage included 12 use-cases and final or the third stage included 31 use-cases. In between each stage they have given gaps. The purpose of that is to contact client and update the work and if there any changes to made they can do within the gap allocated. According to the project manager there was a mistake that had done which was they have allocated 2 use cases at the beginning and in the final stage has allocated 31 use-cases which is not very efficient. Because in the final stage there are lot of work to carry out. But the project team has managed to over come from that and complete the project on time. After that members of the development team talked about the project areas, technology that has used in the project. Members also mentioned about the PEGA system. PEGA platform has built on J2EE framework. This PEGA platform makes the work easy as it provides effective interaction between the project team and other employees in the company which can contribute ideas to the project and also in PEGA platform most of the coding work auto generated which makes the work easy. 

One of the members mentioned about the process of development as follow,

• 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

Learning Outcomes:-

From the industrial tour I got more information about the Virtusa, working process of it etc. Before visit to the Virtusa I was aware of the company since there are many past students in APIIT currently work in the Virtusa. Also from the vacancies that had published on various job vacancy websites, news paper articles and etc. I have heard about good and bad, both sides of Virtusa. After visiting to the Vitusa all my doubts were cleared and got a better awareness of Virtusa. From the first presentation presented by Mr. Shehan I got a clear about what exactly Virtusa is. Because I thought Virtusa is a Sri Lankan company which caters only within Sri Lanka but from the presentation I got to know it is a company that expanded all over the world. I also got a clear knowledge about how Virtusa treats employees, facilities and benefits that gain by working in Virtusa. The working environment of Virtusa has two sections as in on shore and off shore. There are three main off shores they are Sri Lanka, India and US. Offshore is the place the development of a project carries on. On shore means some of the employees go on meet clients and gather clients' requirements and send information/data to offshore which helpful to develop the system. From the second lecture I got a better understanding of BPM. Because before this presentation I only had heard about few things about BPM. The area of BPM was new for me when I attend to the presentation of the presentation and now I know what is BPM, what are the areas it covers, how useful it is. From the presentation that took place in board room I got a understand of working environment of the Virtusa and about the PEGA system work in the company. One of the main thing I learnt during that presentation was hot houses. I was not aware about this fact finding technique before. From this industrial tour I got understand about the working environment and how the industrial projects differs from academic project. Finally I must mentioned this tour was very effective and I gained good knowledge about different areas in the industry.  

References:-

Facebook. (2012).The Business Information Technology Batch at APIIT visits Virtusa. [Online]. Available at:  https://www.facebook.com/media/set/set=a.10151007146530887.417824.249912980886&type=1

[Accessed 6th September 2012]

neccfoundersgolf. (2012). Logo of Virtusa. [Online]. Available at: http://www.neccfoundersgolf.org/uploadimages/6/virtusa-logo-cmyk.jpg vitusa image 

[Accessed 6th September 2012]