While planning for the development of mobile applications, enterprises are increasingly challenged with deciding what approach to take: build native applications, create HTML5 mobile websites, or take the hybrid (cross-platform) approach?

With multiple native platforms available (iOS, Blackberry, Android, Symbian, Windows Mobile, and Windows Phone 7 to name a few), it is becoming increasingly difficult to find the diverse skillset (and the budget) required for native app development and to support each of these platforms. HTML5 presents a nice alternative, but mobile websites lose the advantages that you gain with an app store based deployment strategy. That’s where hybrid (cross-platform) mobile frameworks come in – providing, in principle, the best of both worlds. However, the choices get complicated when you throw in other factors such as usability, performance, vendor lock-in, and ease of development to the mix.

As a strategic partner to organizations ranging from venture backed startups to Fortune 500 global leaders, we have been increasingly asked this question: what should my mobile strategy be? And while the final decision is not simple – it depends on many factors beyond technology, we have developed a Mobile Technology Decision Engine that can, through the use of scorecarding, help you make that decision. The tool is now available as a Facebook app, and is actually pretty easy to use: just answer a few simple questions related to the platforms you need to support, deployment strategy, and feature set required. The tool will provide an overall and platform specific score based on these inputs. Check it out here.

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Category: Mobile | No Comments »

This week Nagarro is at Cloud Connect in Santa Clara, Calif. February 13-16, 2012. If you are planning to be the show, please drop by and see us at the Cloud Computing Expo in booth #805.

We’ve been fascinated with the cloud since its infancy, working with cloud solutions from providers like Microsoft Azure, Google App Engine, Amazon Web Services and others. Our enterprise customers rely on us for cloud enablement services including technical assessments, readiness workshops, platform evaluation, cloud migration, new cloud based application development, integration with internal applications, maintenance and support of cloud infrastructure.

Although it’s easy to get swept up in this exciting trend, we are staying focused on helping our customers leverage the cloud strategically. We’ve seen a lot of companies hop on the cloud bandwagon, only to discover that they don’t really understand how to derive meaningful value from these powerful technologies.

Questions about your cloud strategy? Share your comments below, or send us an email at info@nagarro.com.

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This week we are celebrating Nagarro’s appraisal at CMMI Maturity Level 5, the software industry’s highest recognition for company-wide success in establishing robust, standardized, and well-defined software development processes.

We began working toward this goal in 2008 and achieved Maturity Level 3 in 2009. In early 2011 we reached Maturity Level 4. And after much hard work and a rigorous appraisal process, we have cleared the final hurdle with Maturity Level 5.

For our customers, this means they can rest assured knowing that the world’s foremost authority on software development processes agrees that Nagarro has got it right. For Nagarro, it means we will continue to build on our success as we tackle our customers’ most strategic technology projects to deliver competitive advantage.

Huge thanks (and high fives!) to everyone at Nagarro who helped us reach this important milestone, and to all of the loyal Nagarro customers who have allowed us to demonstrate our expertise.

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Last week I attended the Silicon Valley Business Journal’s event celebrating the “40 Under 40” list for 2011.  In addition to getting a sneak peek at plans for the 49ers new stadium, it was great to meet face to face with my fellow entrepreneurs from this year’s list. Continued »

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Nagarro has been ranked as one of the Top Ten IT Employers in India by the “Dataquest CMR Best Employer Survey 2011.” In addition to making the Top Ten IT Employers listing, Nagarro scored among the top ten in the survey’s HR Rankings, reflecting Nagarro’s strengths with regard to training programs, career growth opportunities and overall employee satisfaction.

Other highlights:

Nagarro was also ranked within the top ten for several sub-categories including Employee Retention, Employee Satisfaction and Gender Inclusivity, and within the top 20 IT for Dream Company, Preferred Employer, Managing Slowdown and Company Culture.

As we expand Nagarro’s global presence and actively continue to seek out the brightest minds in the industry, we appreciate being recognized for our success in employee retention, employee satisfaction, average tenure and overall internal stability.

To learn more, please read our press release and the complete survey results.

Category: General | 4 Comments »

The last decade has seen great changes in India, and no city reflects this new India more than Gurgaon does. In this Millennium City you find both the energy and promise that characterize the new India, as well as its chaos and disappointments.

The litany of shortcomings is familiar – broken roads, little public transport, power and water shortages, deficient sewage, and a high incidence of violent crime. Against this, you have considerable efforts being made by organizations such as iamgurgaon and the Cybercity Welfare Society, and by a Municipal Council that is trying hard to take control of the situation.

Gurgaon has the potential to be a role model for the modernizing country. Below, I humbly suggest five ideas for getting there.
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Category: General | 1 Comment »

Just searching the title of this blog post on Google will give you a ton of information and opinions about HTML5 mobile apps versus native mobile apps. In my opinion, the question that is being asked is sometimes unfair. If you are asking whether HTML5 mobile apps will be the death of native apps, then you are putting too much responsibility on the poor young shoulders of HTML5.

However, if you are asking whether HTML5 is a viable alternative to native apps for developing mobile apps, then we are talking about a completely different matter. This is a debate that often comes up when we are discussing mobile strategies with our clients and prospects. The answer (as is the case with most things) is always “it depends”. In order to put things in a little more structured manner, I put together a couple of SWOT diagrams that illustrate what is good or bad with both these options.

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Category: Mobile | 4 Comments »

For the third time in recent years, Nagarro has been named to the Global Services 100 list, a prestigious industry survey which identifies the world’s leading outsourcing providers. Continued »

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A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to present at event hosted by the German State of Hessen and its FrankfurtRhineMain region in cooperation with the German Consulate and the German American Business Association at the Marriott in San Francisco. I shared Nagarro’s experience working in Europe, and the ups and downs in our successful journey as we have grown in Europe over the last decade.

The attendees were business leaders from the local community, several of whom were looking to expand their operations into Germany and other parts of western Europe. The presentation was well received, and has been reported on their website here. As we enter the next phase of our growth, we continue look for the support of our customers and team members to continue our expansion in Germany and in the rest of Europe.

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Last year we began working with Helveta, the UK-based maker of supply chain intelligence software, CI World™. Helveta was seeing record demand for its unique product, which offers companies with global supply chains – such as the food and timber industries – complete supply chain visibility and control.

In order to ramp up its software development efforts and fill out its engineering team, Helveta brought on Nagarro as a partner. Helveta and Nagarro worked side by side to offer customers the latest product advances even sooner than originally planned, cementing Helveta’s position as the leader in its market.

Nagarro produced the results Helveta asked for on time and within budget. But what really stands out is the feedback we hear from Helveta again and again: Nagarro goes the extra mile, bringing a creative and proactive approach to this partnership in order to deliver real strategic value.

To hear about this project in the customer’s own words, please check out our new Helveta testimonial video.

Category: General, Java | 1 Comment »

The recent buzz about Apple leaving people running OS X 10.4 in a lurch if they buy the latest iOS devices (such as iPhone 4 or iPad 2) got me thinking about how important backwards compatibility is when you are a products company. The issue is that new iOS devices require iTunes 10.x to sync with the computer. However, iTunes 10.x requires a minimum of OS X 10.5 to run. This means that anyone who is still running the (couple of generations old) 10.4 version cannot use a new iOS device unless they upgrade their operating system.

The catch? You have to pay for the upgrade. There is an upgrade cost of around $30 to upgrade. The reason there’s been a lot of buzz is that the new iTunes works just fine on Windows XP (OS X competitor). This simple instance demonstrates the wildly different approach that a product company can take when it comes to providing backwards compatibility.

This post is not an analysis – instead it’s just a collection of examples taken from various articles about how different software giants handle backwards compatibility.

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Here’s a blog post by Martin Fowler on Cross Platform mobile applications. This post talks about the availability of various cross-platform toolkits – allowing you to write a mobile app once and deploy many times. A lot has been said about the flaws and benefits of this approach.

Mr. Fowler talks about the various reasons for why one should not use cross-platform toolkits. From usability perspective to security models across various platforms, there are several reasons that are not in favor of the cross-platform toolkits.

The major crux of his argument is that all platforms are different when it comes to how they are used best. So, if you are not designing for any particular platform (as you are doing when using a cross-platform kit), then you are not putting out the best design for any platform. So, while you do save on some effort and cost, you lose out on delighting your end-user because the overall experience of your application is going to be mediocre.

Here is a summary of the article:

• Don’t use cross-platform toolkits
• For maximum reach: build a web app that looks like a web app
• To appeal to a particular platform: build a native app for that platform, with an experience design based on that platform’s interaction style.

While most of what he says makes a lot of sense (as it should), I can’t help but think that there are still going to be plenty of situations wherein the cross-platform toolkit method looks very enticing. But we are finding that more and more such situations are well handled by making a web application (as Mr. Fowler recommends).

With HTML5 the differences between what you can do with a cross-platform app and HTML5 are not so significant anymore.

What is the approach that is followed at where you work?

Comic credit: Geek and Poke.

Category: Mobile | No Comments »

Measuring your application for performance is something that is one of those things that sometimes gets pushed to the end of milestones. This means that when you do test for performance, if the application is not performing well due to any number of reasons, you have to go back and fix it – going back and fixing things is always costlier and riskier than doing them right in the first place.

At Nagarro, we tend to stay away from this model by training our team members to follow a philosophy that advocates giving importance to performance throughout the development lifecycle. As the diagram below shows, this includes measuring and testing for performance iteratively throughout the development process.

Why is this hard? At Nagarro, we have test benches setup along with a formal performance testing process that the project teams use to measure the performance of their applications. However, being ‘formal’ and how they are setup, it is difficult to use them multiple times during the project. Ideally, I would like performance to be measured in our projects on a daily basis.

We ought to be able to measure the performance of our applications on the fly (on demand).

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Category: Scalability, Testing | 2 Comments »

With the evolution of web services standards and their usage in exposing interfaces by enterprise systems , it is much easier to connect to the today’s ERP systems. SAP has embraced open standards for integration across all its products to expose the business functionality as SOA-compliant web services.

Web services-compliant interfaces provide a significant ease in integration for business data exchange between enterprise applications and exchanging business data with external trading partners. Earlier, this SAP specific integration was the responsibility of the SAP adapters provided by the middleware product suite, and used SAP proprietary protocols (RFC, ALE). The use of web services standards makes the task of data integration simpler.

Web services-based interfaces do not, however, deal with the data payload being exchanged between the SAP and non-SAP systems. For example, business document representation (such as an Invoice) would be different across SAP and non-SAP systems. Hence, the role of middleware in terms of document transformation between business applications is as valid as before.

Middleware infrastructure takes care of managing the data exchange between enterprise applications having different document representations. Additionally, the middleware infrastructure takes care of integration scenarios such as master data publication to downstream systems (e.g. price change of an item, that needs to be published to the relevant systems such as Point of Sale). The use of web services and a SOA architecture simplifies the integration end points (eliminating the need for proprietary SAP connectors), complemented by the EAI middleware taking care of the data transformations and message orchestration between different SAP and non-SAP systems.

This SearchSOA article captures some of our recommendations on SAP PI and SAP SOA.

Category: SAP | 1 Comment »

Many of our customers think we are, as confirmed by the judges from this year’s Global Outsourcing 100 List, the International Association of Outsourcing Professionals’® (IAOP) listing of the world’s top outsourcers.

We are proud to report that Nagarro earned a perfect score for Customer Satisfaction in the 2011 Global Outsourcing 100 List. This score, which is based on a combination of direct customer input and third-party references, was tabulated by an esteemed panel of IAOP judges from companies like Eastman Kodak, Liberty Mutual Insurance and American Express.

While no one is perfect, this level of achievement sets the bar at the highest level – which is just where we like it, and exactly where our customers should expect it.

To read more about Nagarro’s rankings in the 2011 Global Outsourcing 100 List, please click here to see our press release.

Category: General | 5 Comments »