CognitiveClouds

BACKGROUND

Yelloday is the next generation of engagement software. It is a business workplace culture and collaboration platform. Yelloday is a cloud-based interactive technology to help employees increase their ability to take action and measure the results. I am a director. 

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

Yelloday builds employee-driven momentum that can take an organization’s engagement programs to a new level. Yelloday captures the meaningful information and this facilitates interactions by providing performance benchmarks to stimulate business improvements.  

SOLUTION

Yelloday is cloud-based software. The frontend is coded using HTML5/CSS3 using the AngularJS framework. This communicates with the API Layer to fetch the data and display it on the client. CognitiveClouds worked through the best solution with us. Design, development, beta, and production testing were the services provided. 

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

We are just completing beta and about to go into the production phase. It is too early to give full results or an assessment of CognitiveClouds' work.

BACKGROUND

VIBLIO lets you search through your videos by more than just the date of the video. Now, you can find videos by where they were taken and who is in them. VIBLIO also gives you the power to create private groups that can share videos together in a private platform. I am the president of VBILIO.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

VIBLIO needed a way for its users to transfer their videos from their phone to their private VIBLIO library automatically.

SOLUTION

VIBLIO selected CogntiveClouds because of their experience with mobile app development as well as their understanding of video processing. The app they helped us develop is more complex than most iPhone apps. It involves a deep understanding of iOS and a lot of integration with our backend servers.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

The CognitiveClouds team was very professional throughout the engagement. They worked closely with our development team to keep us abreast of their work. So often when you work with a third-party contractor, they “discover” aspects of the project that require delays or additional fees. The CognitiveClouds team was excellent in covering the agreed upon scope and meeting our deadlines.

BACKGROUND

Yatra.com is second largest online travel agency in India with more than 25 percent of the Indian online travel market. It provides end-to-end online travel solution, including flight, hotels, holidays, and car, bus, and train booking, to both B2C [business-to-consumer] and B2B [business-to-business] customers. The length and breadth of Yatra's services is among the most comprehensive in India. As a brand, Yatra is the most recognized brand by consumers with an extremely high brand recall. With more than $1 billion in ticket sales, and an annual growth rate of more than 20 percent. It is slated to change the Indian online travel market space.

At Yatra, I head its mobile product and business. As the product head, I oversee product strategy, conceptualization, roadmap, delivery, and post-launch success parameters. Additionally, I am responsible for business growth of the mobile channel. While desktop products are organized by business verticals, such as flights, hotels, holidays, cars, buses and trains, mobile products are organized by channel, given their unique requirements.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

While Yatra was a market leader on desktop, mobile as a channel posed significant challenges. Lack of mobile technology skill set, sub-optimal UI [user interface] skills and absent mobile vision plagued the mobile strategy. When I took over the mobile product and business, I shifted my focus to getting a world-class product ready at the earliest, and then move aggressively in the market for promotion. My target was to take mobile from a mere 0.5 percent of overall business to more than 15 percent of overall during next three quarters. For that getting a great product with world-class UI, superlative performance, and excellent features and functionalities was a prerequisite. It was with this goal that we hired CognitiveClouds to be our mobile development partner, who would provide us with UI design, app development, and app support services.

SOLUTION

We, at Yatra, decided to go with native applications for both iOS and Android platforms with customized UI for phone and tablet devices. Unlike universal applications with 2X UI, customized UI ensured best possible user experience to Yatra customers. For a project of this strategic importance, we invited proposals from around 10 potential partners. Our key selection metric included design skills, technical skills, and delivery capabilities.

Among all potential partners, I was most impressed by CognitiveClouds owing to [several] factors. They didn't quote lowest price only to win the contract. They quoted real pricing as they recognized our need to have a world-class application. They were very honest about their assessment of our requirements, and proposed solutions. At no time, they proposed to do things with a view to maximize their revenues. Their design and technical manpower skills were at par with the best with professionals who delivered best-in-class products while working in different organizations.

The scope of application development was daunting - delivering end-to-end travel search and booking application for the second-largest OTA in India. The application would, in all likelihood, be one of the most awaited and used. With such pressures to deliver and within six months, it was no easy task. Their job was to design the UI, develop end-to-end applications for both iOS and Android for phones and tablets, and work with Yatra team on features and functionalities.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

I was delighted by the application that CognitiveClouds delivered. They excelled on all parameters including exceptional UI, superior performance, and unique features and functionalities.

Not just that, they delivered within the time frame and budget. In fact, it was better than what we had expected. Within two months of application launches, mobile soared to more than 16 percent of overall revenues from mere 0.5 to 1.0 percent. Our ratings on the App Store soared during the initial months. It did dip a bit later, but that was primarily on account of the project scope that was Yatra's responsibility. We had not scoped some customer service features, the lack of those services did beat down our reviews a bit, [but] CognitiveClouds is not responsible. I would recommend CognitiveClouds any day to any company for their quality of work and honesty.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the former VP of Engineering of a software company.

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Building products for Digital Transformation

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire CognitiveClouds to accomplish?

• Built a product for digital transformation of construction
• Connect Design all the way to Construction

SOLUTION

How did you find CognitiveClouds?

Other

Why did you select CognitiveClouds over others?

• High ratings
• Close to my geographic location
• Great culture fit

What was the size of CognitiveClouds’s team?

6-10 Employees

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

Cognitive Clouds work with my team to build a software to manage all aspects of Construction from Design to Construction and handing over connecting project management, collaboration and execution.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

• Quality UX designs and Code
• Testing metrics

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

The project management methodology was Agile with two week sprints. The deliverables were mostly on time, and the team responded actively to our needs.

What was your primary form of communication with CognitiveClouds?

• In-Person Meeting
• Virtual Meeting
• Email
• Messaging App

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

Ability to work with agility as we were a startup ourselves and be able to work with changing requirements quickly is unique about the company

Are there any areas for improvement or something CognitiveClouds could have done differently?

Some times we found people with less skills being pushed in who we had to send back.