Talreja, Sogeti’s vice president of enterprise solutions consulting, said that his team was likely to encounter their Teradata counterparts, including IT Director Rob Kyre, in the company parking lot, at area stores or industry conferences.
“That local perspective brings a different dynamic — that I should be able to look Rob in the eye six months from now and be proud of what I’ve done,” Talreja said.
Launched in March to about 500 Teradata workers worldwide, the mobile app is now used thousands of times daily and has benefited the company, Kyre said. “We continue to get fantastic feedback from our global field service representatives that it helps them do their jobs better and more efficiently,” he said.
In addition, the project created one new job at Teradata for an internal app support team, Kyre said.
Talreja and Kyre discussed their companies’ first-ever collaboration this month at Technology First’s seventh annual “Taste of IT” conference in downtown Dayton.
Teradata is a $2.6 billion data warehousing company with about 450 local employees and about 9,000 globally. Kyre said the company wanted a mobile app that its 500 to 700 customer service representatives could use when replacing or upgrading its equipment at thousands of data centers worldwide.
Traditionally, those workers used a web-based application to update their job status that required them to carry a bulky laptop computer. The workers often had trouble accessing the Internet at customer locations, some of which are like underground bunkers. That created extra work and unnecessary delays, Kyre said.
Teradata required a mobile application that could take the customer service process from start to finish, Kyre said. The app needed to function in offline mode, support “push” notifications, and send updates in real-time as soon as the device finds a wireless signal.
After an “exhaustive” search, Teradata selected Sogeti, an IT consulting services company, as its external partner to develop the app, Kyre said.
Sogeti is a business unit of the Capgemini Group, a $13 billion global IT firm headquartered in Paris, France.
Sogeti Group has about 20,000 employees at branches in 15 countries, with annual revenues of about $2 billion. Sogeti USA, headquartered in Miami Twp., has annual revenues of about $500 million.
Sogeti has been doing an increasing amount of mobile development for businesses over the past two years, Talreja said. Consequently, the company was able to leverage experience from other clients, such as how to present information to field workers, for the Teradata project, he said.
The goal was not just the initial app release, but rather the potential of what could come next.
“What would really change the game and move the dial from productivity and accuracy to delivering field service in completely different way,” Talreja said. Future aspects could include training, mileage-based GPS and real-time collaboration, he said.
The project was completed over 18 weeks that included the 2012 Christmas holiday season, which Kyre said was an “aggressive schedule” given the app’s complexity. Teradata had a team of seven workers and Sogeti had nine — three in Miami Twp. and six at that company’s facilities in India.
The teams developed native applications for both the Android and iOS mobile platforms, because Teradata workers use their own devices. Kyre declined to disclose the cost of the project.
Sogeti’s team focused on the user interface, source code and testing, while Teradata’s teams worked on database and back-end services integration.
The biggest challenge was “keeping both threads in sync,” Talreja said. That meant knowing what was required; which team was going to deliver what piece when; being able to align both schedules; and adjusting priorities “on a fairly dynamic basis,” he said.
The Teradata app’s successful deployment opens the door for additional mobile capabilities for the company. “It is there in concept, but now there is the ability to deliver something different than what they had on their laptops,” Talreja said.
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