Spotlight

QA and software testing experts

Nivedan Prakash traces the growth journey of QA InfoTech, a company which takes great pride in being an unbiased and innovative Quality Assurance and testing solutions provider, to many global organizations

QA InfoTech (QAIT) is one of the leading software Quality Assurance and testing companies in India that specializes in providing independent and unbiased services to Fortune 500 companies. It provides cost-effective QA/testing solutions while keeping in mind the urgency to launch products without sacrificing the quality. QAIT undertakes projects located around the world and feels committed to creating a challenging and rewarding work environment.

Today, QAIT is touted as one of the largest innovation powerhouses in the software testing industry giving their services in different verticals, including the BFSI, retail, education, publishing, and government sectors. The company’s revenue for 2006-07 was of $2 million, which was soon doubled to $4 million in the next financial year. QAIT in 2008-09 witnessed a substantial increase in the revenue, taking it to $7 million. And by 2010, it expects it to cross the $10 million mark, as about 95% of the revenues come from overseas.

Talking about his idea of further growth in the industry, Founder and CEO of QAIT, Mukesh Sharma, said, “The global software testing market is estimated to be $13 billion and India is expected to contribute to 70% of the market. The company’s present share is $6.5-$7 billion. We have had repeat business with all our clients and we continue to share a good working rapport with them. We have been serving them for the last so many years, and that explains why we as a company have been evolving at such a tremendous rate since the last three-four years.”

The foundation

Founded by Mukesh Sharma and Rajesh Sharma (currently CIO), QAIT started its operations in 2003 with a vision to provide unbiased QA testing solutions to organizations in specified time and cost frame and help the clients meet their business goals faster and better.

The company has been expanding by leaps and bounds since its inception in 2003. It has seen tremendous growth from less than five employees to more than 350 to date. Conceived in 2003 and starting its operations from a rented accommodation in 2004, now QAIT owns three offices in the Noida region, including one in a Special Economic Zone. It has five established centers of excellence in India and the US.

As with any emerging company seeking to scale rapidly, QAIT faced challenges related to hiring and retaining the right people, building an effective sales team, and adopting an online marketing strategy. “The keystones of the company’s success are its commitment towards quality, ability to empathize with the customers, its people and remarkable foresightedness. The vision can be a personal or an organizational one but there has to be a balance between organizational goal and resource satisfaction. Such is the prescience of QA InfoTech’s leaders,” asserted Sharma.

This vision helped the company realize at a much early stage that there was indeed a need for someone who could offer quality better. With so much development happening, the company truly capitalized on the need for a well rounded independent software testing provider.

Adding further, Sharma pointed out that they have been able to ensure repeat business with all world renowned clients such as Adobe Systems, Cengage Learning, Pearson, and Kaplan amongst others. The company plans to continuously strive to serve them better while adding many more new customers in all the verticals that they serve.

From a five-person start-up operation in 2003 to a company with more than 350 staff situated in five Centers of Excellence (four in India and one in US), QAIT has come a long way. QA InfoTech first came into limelight when it won a multi-year multi-million dollar contract with a Fortune 500 company. The company’s patience and perseverance, and an uncompromising attitude towards quality, fairness and transparency in its dealings, and building and maintaining synergistic relationships with clients helped it gain visibility in the industry.

Line of business

QAIT specializes in setting up end-to-end software testing processes and methodologies to ensure highest level of test solutions delivered to achieve customer satisfaction. The verticals that it serves range from the BFSI to publishing, education, government, and retail sectors. All this has resulted in guaranteed repeat business, increased revenue, building a huge knowledge-base, thus setting a trend for those who are contemplating a plunge in this field.

One thing that the company does differently and that sets it apart is that it emphasizes the most on ‘execution.’ Usually the focus in QA and testing is more on ‘processes.’ On the contrary, QAIT along with building its own processes and metrics believes in delivering by actual execution of jobs and processes.

The key factors driving its success are the continual innovation and advances in the test frameworks that it develops, working closely with its customers, staying focused, capturing the right opportunities at the right time and being devoted to providing quality. QAIT has set up a Core Quality Engineering Group to look at some of the newer technology areas and has developed several state-of-the-art in-house frameworks which could work independent of tools and makes the job much simpler, quicker and more reliable. The company’s strategy is to focus on demonstrating some of the latest technologies and making suitable recommendations to ensure that its customers always benefit from best-in-class technologies and hedge their risks in trying out new technologies and tools.

The company has continually tried to evolve better ways of performing the routine testing jobs, automation testing, functional testing and manual testing tasks. “By developing tool independent automation frameworks and by advocating the use of open source tools, we have been able to serve our customers in a manner that helps keep up the trust and reliability factor. And there is nothing like being called as a preferred and trusted software QA vendor by one’s own customers. Such is the credibility that we’ve been able to build so far. And we wish to further build upon it in the years to come,” said Sharma.

Meanwhile, the company has accomplished several milestones till date. For example, QAIT’s strategic relationship with SmarteSoft, its alliance with Microsoft to serve them as a software QA vendor, serving Adobe Systems with their localization testing needs, its new state-of-the-art mobile device testing lab, recent addition of a new facility in Noida SEZ, are some of its achievements in this space.

Sharma pointed out, “eLearning is also our forte. We have successfully been able to provide quality testing services to our clients in this domain such as Pearson, Cengage Learning, Kaplan, Adobe, etc. One of our major achievements is our unique expertise in test automation using open source technologies, thereby adding value for customers in terms of faster time to market and lower costs.”

Employee-centric organization

Currently, QA InfoTech employee strength is more than 350. The working atmosphere has been excellent as hiring and retaining the right people is always a priority area for QAIT. Along with building upon its strengths and being the first ones to foray into quality, hiring the right set of people gave it an edge over others to follow.

“Our people are our asset. The negligible attrition rate reflects how much we value our experts; some of whom have been working with us since the very beginning. Harnessing the right kind of people, clinching the best opportunities in the market and being able to put ourselves in the customers’ shoes has kept us at the forefront,” stated Sharma affirmatively.  

Imparting extensive in-house training by experts to the resources in the company’s state-of-the-art laboratories and facilities has been a key factor for its success.

QAIT’s vision

Consolidation and mergers is where the world is heading towards in the present times. The company is open to look at opportunities to acquire organizations that are strategically placed in the testing community. Some of the drivers for QAIT for such a move would be opportunity, novelty, global expansion, business needs, enhanced reputation in marketplace or with stakeholders, growth in market share, foray into new markets, and access to new technology and talent.

The drive to be the best provider has led the company to explore more and more options of test automation through which it could serve its clients better. These automated tests harness use of open source tools and technologies which can be used to considerably reduce the time taken to perform certain routine testing tasks such as test case creation, test case management, compatibility testing, result reporting, etc.

QA InfoTech strives to be the number one in the markets served, as it wishes to focus on future and its strengths. It is actively engaged in several initiatives to move forward. One of its key decisions has been to increase its sales and marketing efforts and also an increased investment on new tools and technologies.

nivedan.prakash@expressindia.com