Vibrant Info

Please describe your company and your position there.

I run a user experience design company called Redd Experience Design. One of the requirements from a development partner is for them to have an eye for detail as we do. We have worked with Vibrant for a long time and have been impressed with their attention to detail and this KPIT project was no exception either. I would recommend them to anyone that may be looking for a development partner for their projects.

For what projects/services did your company hire Vibrant Info?

We worked with Vibrant for the development of an adaptive website that run atop a Wordpress platform. The front-end needed to be updated often and the corresponding ability needed to be provided on the back-end as well.

What were your goals for this project?

We had the need to develop complex animation and interaction on the website and had to get it done in a specific timeline as the launch of the site had to coincide with the announcement of the company on the stock exchange. The additional requirement was for the entire website to load under 4 seconds, which was a huge ask, but the team got it done.

How did you select this vendor?

We have previously worked with Rohit and his team and it was a no-brainer when working on this project.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

Conversion of the design into HTML and into a Wordpress template. Wordpress platform customisations to accommodate the front-end. Code optimisations and CDN hosting in order to make it load extremely quickly.

What was the team composition?

Their team consisted of 4 core members and others were added on an as-needed basis.

Can you share any information that demonstrates the impact that this project has had on your business?

We worked with Vibrant as partners to serve our client. The fact that all the goals were achieved made the client quite satisfied and continue to engage with Vibrant as the maintenance team over a long-term contract.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

Rohit (the CEO) appointed a project manager who maintained a system of tasks that kept track of all the upcoming tasks and their dependencies on either the design team or the client.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Not only did all the animation get done, it was developed in such a way that it would load up the website in under 4 seconds. This project was a huge engineering feat.

Are there any areas for improvement?

Project related communication would be an area I would recommend they focus on in the future. A few snags along the way could have been avoided in the future.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the founder and CEO of Yellowchalk, a UI/UX design studio based out of Bangalore.

What challenge were you trying to address with Vibrant Info?

I needed to outsource my development projects.

What was the scope of their involvement?

They helped with development, working with a mixture of multiple technology stacks. Their team created web applications, web products, and mobile applications. We still work together sometimes when I have a loss of bandwidth.

What is the team composition?

I mostly interact with the CEO. There were around 10–12 people working on my projects.

How did you come to work with Vibrant Info?

I was introduced by a mutual friend. When we discussed things, our mindsets matched. They’re very near to our office and it was very easy for us to communicate.

How much have you invested with them?

My company invested $300,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in 2018 until October 2019.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

They were good. There were no complaints from any of my clients. We worked with a U.S. based client where we outsourced the frontend development to them. It was a three-month project and continued for more than 1.5 years. The quality and dedication of the team helped us gain more business as well.

How did Vibrant Info perform from a project management standpoint?

The team is dedicated. If they need to work on the weekend to deliver on time, they do. We communicated via Slack and Hangouts.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They’re quite experienced and have been in the industry for 8 years. They started with a very small team and have grown to a staff of over 200 members. Their resources are very good to work with. They’re all very approachable.

Are there any areas they could improve?

They could improve quality assurance. There were some gaps but those were handled internally before handing it off to the client.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

The technology and experience they bring to the table will help anyone who does a project with them.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I am the CEO of Braman Group. We are an online retail organization, where we have online retail stores. We sell gift cards and promotional products to business that hand them out to customers and their prospects. They redeem them on our eOutlet store websites.

What challenge were you trying to address with Vibrant Info?

We needed some web development for our organization.

What was the scope of their involvement?

They take care of our custom programming, coding, and help with maintenance. We are constantly updating, upgrading, and coming up with new items and features to the stores for our special programs. The sites are ASP.NET, and there is a lot of PHP and HTML involved.

We are now making a website which gathers information and identifies a special code that the customer enters. This displays a certain number of gifts that customer can choose from, based on that code. Anything entered into that site is transferred over to another site which is the business client dashboard. The business client who is using the program will actually be able to issue a digital gift to the customer when they attend an event or promotion.

We built nine stores that all talk to each other. When a customer registers in one store, their information is transferred to eight other stores. When edits or changes are made to their personal information, it carries across the nine stores. This was a custom feature, as every store we have is an individual and independently run, although built on the same software platform. We also have B2B websites, as well as B2C websites, and different programs for winning prizes, and we built all those together. It is complex to make the websites talk to the others and do all the programming involved.

What is the team dynamic?

I work with one person that is dedicated to our company full-time. Sometimes, they will bring in another one or two developers that they consult with. My employees here work with them and tell them what we want to happen.

How did you come to work with Vibrant Info?

We started out with a little test project, which went well. It was quick and was very cost effective. After that, I started giving them more and more projects, and we have since worked out a full-time arrangement.

How much have you invested in them?

We have them on a full-time salary at $500 a week.

What is the status of this engagement?

We have been working together for four or five years now.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

Our business has been a tremendous success, and everything we are doing has been successful. Everything they have built for us works and does what it is supposed to do.

No other sites identify codes to specific gifts or do a lot of things we do with the customer on the backend; identifying with the client, know where they are coming from, tracking their gift card codes, and spreading it out across multiple stores. 

How did Vibrant Info perform from a project management standpoint?

They have been pretty good. Initially, there was a little bit of a communication gap, but it wasn’t too significant. When I am trying to express what we want to do and why, it is better off to leave out the explanation, and instead just tell them what we want. That was the biggest problem we had in the beginning, but they figured all of this out as we went along. It is now great and has been working out really well with them.

Communication has been good. We chat with them on Skype and can work with them while they are working. They have actually changed their hours to be able to work with us during our working hours to allow for constant review and changes live.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They program what you want them to. They put in a lot more than eight hours a day; actually over ten hours a day, every day, which goes beyond the norm. They give us a lot of hours, and it’s not because they are slow, it’s because there is a lot of work we are doing. I can send them some information, and because they are over nine hours ahead of us, by the time I wake up in the morning, they have already started the project.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, I have been tremendously satisfied with their work.

Do you have any advice for potential clients of theirs?

Be specific about your needs, try to keep a lot of fluff out of it, and be direct in telling them exactly what you want the site to do.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We are a software development company that does mobile and web apps, websites, design, and technical support and coordination with our customers. We have in-house developers; however, we also reach out to some offshore companies for some projects. Some of these are full projects, while others are more maintenance type projects.

What challenge were you trying to address with Vibrant Info?

We were a bit overloaded at one point, so we reached out to them for some help. Things worked out and have continued to work out for a while, and we still work together actually from time to time. We have maintenance contracts in place with them. We’ve seen them scale from 4 developers to about 30 or so now, roughly speaking, so we’ve grown together. We send them quite a bit of business from our side to help that growth.

What was the scope of their involvement?

During our client's project, we helped migrate their platform. They had been using Access forms to manage a lot of their products and inventory in-house, which can be a nightmare for an organization that large. We moved everything over to a Sequel server, with a web interface where macro tools and things like that were converted to stored procedures, creating Sequel jobs on the backend.

Everything was optimized and scaled to support multi-user access, also giving them inventory management of both the product descriptions and ingredients. It was a massive data set that we had to go through. Vibrant Info helped us a lot with that data, actually. They helped us with database design, implementation, and migration, including the data exports and imports from Access into Sequel.

The front end was created through WordPress and PHP. With the backend, we resorted to using a Sequel server because it was more compatible with Access. For the sake of time, they were rushing us to get this done quickly, so that was another factor in deciding to go with Sequel server. This was a good call in the long run anyway, because we ended up migrating everything over.

What is the team dynamic?

I worked with about five developers. At one point, there was one PM and a business analyst. They integrated pretty well with my team.

How did you come to work with Vibrant Info?

I first started doing some work with Rohit, who is the owner of the company. He and I worked directly together at one point on a project a long time ago. He helped me a little bit with some of that work, and I think he grew from that one-person shop to the company he has now. I originally reached out to him through Guru.com as kind of an informed, educated guess. I was looking for specific skill at that point, and he had it. This was about 12 years ago and I’ve been working with him since then.

How much have you invested with them?

A lot of our projects were hourly based. We were paying $20 to $30 an hour, depending on the size and requirements of the work. Last year, we spent about $60,000 and have spent about that amount each year we have worked with them.

What is the status of this engagement?

I started working with him about 12 years ago, around 2005. We are still working together.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

I don't really have user feedback that because we were interfacing our client and we weren’t necessarily in direct contact with Vibrant Info. There were definitely some challenges with some projects, but overall our experiences have been very positive. Even with any problems that have come up, they’ve always stepped up and worked around the clock to make sure things get done and that we meet our deadlines. They’re really ethically sound when it comes to meeting the needs of my clients.

How did Vibrant Info perform from a project management standpoint?

Their spoken English was a bit broken or tough to understand sometimes, but we did a lot of our communication via Skype and Slack. It was much easier to communicate once we started using those tools. Despite any communication challenges, they had a good grasp of what needed to be done once it was in writing.

They are based in India, but there were no time barriers for us—it actually worked to our advantage. We had our in-house developers doing stuff during the day, so we coordinated things such that we worked during the day, and they would take over at night. In our case, it was a convenience feature. We were in communication nearly every day.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their team is technically sound. They can definitely deliver on what they say they can, and if they can't, they're not afraid to tell you if they don’t know how to do it. I appreciate that because you don't want to throw something at them and then figure out on your own that they couldn’t understand it or don't have the skills to do it. If something is beyond their capacity, they’re honest about saying no.

Are there any areas they could improve?

The quality of communication could sometimes be improved on. Like I said, once one we got on Skype or Slack, things got better. But I think there's always room for improvement there.

Do you have any advice for potential clients of Vibrant Info?

If you’re okay with timezone differences, you’re in good shape. It actually worked out well with us. If you can handle that, then by all means, Vibrant Info is the company for you. They know their stuff and they stick around during off-peak hours—they’re accommodating in that way. The timezone differences are the biggest challenge for businesses in this sector.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We do the design, development, and manufacturing of baby products. We’ve been in business for 30 years. I’m the head of marketing and technology which includes conventional, digital, e-commerce, etc. and also IT strategy for the company.

What challenge were you trying to address with Vibrant Info?

We have an open price point brand—mid-market and life luxury. We worked on those websites to provide the personas to consumers. They were all part of the same organization and banner, but they projected different feels to the consumer.

What was the scope of their involvement?

They did some design and development work for our website. We did a rebranding process and then we redesigned the website based on that strategy. They helped design and develop multiple websites for us after that, including backend and maintenance. In the rebranding process, they consulted on the implementation side. There was a lot of media work. They have diverse skills from development, maintenance and the creative side, including some videos, artwork, etc. We use mostly WordPress and all different plugins including MySQL. The backend is WooCommerce and we use many plugins within that ecosystem.

How did you come to work with Vibrant Info?

I’ve known them for 10 years. I worked with them in my previous three jobs. I carried forward that relationship and capability to my current organization. They have come a long way since I first came to know them. They have a much larger team now. They have developed more skills than what they used to have. When I started with them, they were a pure maintenance house. Then they grew to a decent development house. Recently, they’ve also developed skills in video and media. We’re getting a lot more than what we were getting before. Otherwise, I would need multiple people working for me.

How much have you invested with them?

My yearly cost is $200,000-$250,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

I started working with them, at this company, two years ago.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

The most important thing is that you can trust them and that they will deliver. That’s not easy to come by. A lot of times you get commitments, but people don’t follow through because of communication or other reasons. Vibrant Info is good with that. When I give them something, I know it will show up. That gives me a great deal of confidence in them. If there is a challenge, they communicate to me early on. Their flexibility and quality of work are important. They are also cost-effective. I don’t need to expand my team here.

How did Vibrant Info perform from a project management standpoint?

They have excellent project management skills. We have one contact that makes communication a lot easier. We have Excel documents that we share on a daily basis. I can see what’s done and what’s pending. On a weekly basis, we get a priority list. Every week I can approve that list. We have at least two calls every week. I visit India once a year to spend time with the team. That has helped how the team has evolved.

Their team comes in late and are there until 2:00 p.m. my time. It’s really worked for me because we can chat and I can give quick feedback. We use Skype, email, and WhatsApp to communicate.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their adaptability to change. Recently, I’ve seen them do a lot of mobile development work too. That’s a testament to how they’ve been good in redefining themselves, which is not easy.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I always say nobody’s perfect. If they continue to realize that and improve their excellence, then it’s a good path. If they come to a place where they feel they’re experts, then we have a problem.

Do you have any advice for potential clients?

You can have a vendor/client relationship but I tend to look at them as a partner. I think you can get a lot more out of it and have a long-term view versus a project view. A lot of people make that mistake. Define your expectations and craft new ones according to the success.

Please describe your company and your position there.

We are into Platform creation and product development For various global partners. I am CTO in my company

For what projects/services did your company hire Vibrant Info?

We hired vibrant for additional help on developing a TV app (Samsung tizen and LG webOS)

What were your goals for this project?

Timely delivery with defined quality parameters.

How did you select this vendor?

Vibrant has worked with us in the past so we know their skill set and capabilities.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

End to end creation of Samsung tizen and LG webOS TV apps for an OTT solution.

What was the team composition?

8 Developers.

Can you share any information that demonstrates the impact that this project has had on your business?

It helped us deliver multiple platform in parallel like mobile app, android TV app, fire tv app along with Samsung tizen and LG webOS

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

Project management was done very professionally. We followed agile development and there was biweekly sprint executed.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Professionalism Capabilities and talent of the resources Their customer service and support was impressive.

Are there any areas for improvement?

None that was observed. It worked smoothly for us.