SolutionCase Study

IT Services Firm Enhances Productivity, Shortens Time-to-Market with Improved Development Tools

OverviewCompany: L&T InfotechCompany Website: www.lntinfotech.comCompany Size: Over 18,000Country or Region: IndiaIndustry: IT Services

Company ProfileL&T Infotech is a global IT services and solutions provider. The company offers a strong domain focus that helps clients in different industries maximize the value of their IT expenses.

Business SituationL&T Infotech wanted an agile platform that would allow better communication, integration, and management across teams. The company decided to evaluate modern development tools that would help them achieve this.

SolutionL&T Infotech deployed Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 and Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2012 to gain an integrated development environment.

Benefits Enhances productivity by 30 percent Provides greater project visibility Improves collaboration Shortens time-to-market by 20─25

percent

We have significantly improved our application lifecycle management process, which makes it extremely easy for developers to stay connected and be productive. This is improving efficiency by approximately 30 percent.”

Makarand Deolalkar, Executive Vice President, Industrials Cluster, L&T Infotech

The IT team at L&T Infotech often leads new technology deployments that subsequently roll out to client projects, benefiting the entire organization. One such pilot is the upgrade to a modern development platform. The team deployed Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 and Team Foundation Server 2012 for its flagship self-service BI solution, MARS (Multi-dimensional Analytics and Reporting Service). By adopting an agile development process, the company has seen dramatic improvement in developer productivity. Team Foundation Server 2012 provides a solution that helps the teams store all project-related information and communications. The improved visibility makes it extremely easy for teams to stay connected and reduces time-to-market by at least 20─25 percent.

SituationL&T Infotech, a subsidiary of L&T (Larsen & Toubro), is a global IT services company based in Mumbai, India. NASSCOM (National Association of Software and Services Companies) ranked it as the eighth largest Indian IT company in 2012-2013. The company has 42 registered offices in 24 countries. It employs standards of the Software Engineering Institute's (SEI) Capability Maturity Model (CMM) and is a certified Level 5 organization.

The IT organization at L&T Infotech plays a vital role in championing innovative solutions that enhance the efficiency of the organization. It pilots technologies that over time become a standard across the organization.

In 2012, the IT organization launched a flagship IP development project, MARS (Multi-dimensional Analytics and Reporting Service). MARS is a complete self-service BI solution enabling business users to create and publish interactive reports. The solution followed an agile model but for project collaboration and daily Scrum sessions (iterative and incremental software development framework) the communication medium used was emails, conference calls and third-party tools.

“To bring the entire team on a single page, we had to do lot of back and forth over email, which meant there was no single version of truth,” says Ashish Varerkar, Head of Microsoft Practice, L&T Infotech. “It was time to look at new solutions that enhance productivity and collaboration of

the team, as well as enable us to deliver better quality solutions.”

The transition required a technology upgrade. The company looked for a robust yet scalable solution that would work effectively with further growth. Always wanting to move to a newer technology, L&T Infotech decided to upgrade to a more multi-device friendly interface. “Primarily our aim was to provide an integrated development environment for the team and have end-to-end visibility into a project.”

SolutionIn October 2012, L&T Infotech deployed Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 and Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2012 to replace its previous development environment. The company approved of the new integrated development environment (IDE) from Microsoft to manage application development and the agile development processes. “For us, mobile development is de facto,” explains Anup Karade, Senior Technical Architect, L&T Infotech. “We need to manage requirements across three delivery channels ─ mobile, tablet and desktop. At the same time we wanted to provide a common management tool where the entire team can collaborate and manage the source code.”

By using Team Foundation Server 2012, L&T Infotech has the flexibility it needs to handle virtually any project. The developers have a better understanding of what is required. An application lifecycle

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“It improves manageability from requirement to deployment. The single integrated platform reduces defects along with the testing time. We are able to expedite the entire development cycle and reduce time-to-market by 20─25 percent.”

Abhay Chitnis, VP & CTO, L&T Infotech

management (ALM) tool like Team Foundation Server 2012 makes it extremely easy for each of the developers to stay connected and be productive.

With the transition to Visual Studio 2012, developers have been able to utilize the new features completely. They use Single Page Application (SPA) available with ASP.NET 4.5, which comes with Visual Studio 2012. ASP.NET SPA helps to build applications that include significant client-side interactions using HTML 5 and JavaScript. “As the project is primarily being written in C# we have used synchronous programming in C# for Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) service calls,” explains Prasad Bhalekar, Senior Project Manager, L&T Infotech. “Coding has been a lot easier because of JavaScript IntelliSense and HTML 5 controls.”

Along with all the built-in features of Visual Studio 2012, L&T Infotech also used other extensions like Web Essentials, which add many useful features to the IDE for web developers, such as devColor, which underlines the colors in style sheets and contains a color picker. Other features used include code alignment for formatting the code and image optimizer. These features have dramatically reduced the team’s development and coding efforts.

L&T Infotech is building a cloud-based ERP; and MARS is an important component from a self-service BI perspective. Currently, it is available independently as a product for reporting and analysis. “MARS is an end- user centric BI application which can

connect to any data source, be it Microsoft, MySQL, Oracle, or any other,” says Parsh Ramanathan, Head of Business Intelligence/Data Warehousing Practice, L&T Infotech. “Unlike the traditional BI applications where IT intervention is needed to create a report, MARS is entirely a self-service tool. The only point where IT is involved is to define a data source.”

With its deployment of Team Foundation Server 2012, L&T Infotech recognizes the improvement in its project management processes. The design, development and test teams now share information and collaborate more efficiently. “We believe that Visual Studio 2012 is powerful, most user friendly and efficient IDE available in the market. Along with Team Foundation Server 2012, it helps us produce and deliver the best quality software for our customers,” says Ashish Varerkar, Head of Microsoft Practice, L&T Infotech.

BenefitsWith the transition to Team Foundation Server 2012, L&T Infotech is seeing immediate benefits to its overall development process. The integrated solution is resulting in significant business growth, increased productivity and collaboration, and real-time visibility into project status.

Enhances Productivity by 30 PercentThe dramatically improved integration of the teams through Team Foundation Server 2012 has boosted developer output and quality while increasing productivity. “We

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have radically improved our application lifecycle management process, which makes it extremely easy for developers to stay connected and be productive,” says Komal Machindar, Head of Quality, L&T Infotech. “This is improving efficiency by approximately 30 percent.”

Provides Greater Project VisibilityThe most important improvement for L&T Infotech is that all of the project information is now stored in one place. With the unified location for project information, project managers have a clear view of the project.

Improves CollaborationAnup Karade, Senior Technical Architect, L&T Infotech says, “Integration with Microsoft SharePoint 2010 helps end users collaborate across teams. They can share reports with colleagues and invite comments, which help in faster decision-making.”

Shortens Time-to-Market by 20─25 PercentHaving the entire development environment in one platform also speeds up development. Says Abhay Chitnis, VP & CTO, L&T Infotech, “It improves manageability from requirement to deployment. The single integrated platform reduces defects along with the testing time. We are able to expedite the entire development cycle and reduce time-to-market by 20─25 percent.”

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Visual StudioVisual Studio 2012's Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) capabilities provide your teams with powerful tools that span the entire modern application lifecycle to ensure quality and reduce cycle times while delivering continuous value from design to deployment. Whether you’re developing applications for SharePoint, the web, Windows, Windows Phone, or beyond, Visual Studio is your ultimate all-in-one solution.

For more information go to:www.microsoft.com/visualstudioorwww.msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio

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For More InformationFor more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers in the United States and Canada who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to: www.microsoft.com

For more information about L&T Infotech products and services, or visit the website at: www.lntinfotech.com

Software and Services Microsoft Visual Studio

2012Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2012

Microsoft SQL Server 2012

Hardware Windows 8 Server