Wipro, Mercury join for quality centre

Wipro Technologies and Mercury Interactive Corporation, a business technology optimisation (BTO) company, have announced the setting up of a Centre of Excellence (CoE) at Wipro's Electronic City campus in Bangalore.

While Mercury is a well-known enterprise software company, Wipro is taking its first giant step to establish a firm footing in quality assurance (QA). The coming together means they might go to market together.

Knowledge transfer from both companies is the hallmark of the tie-up. While Wipro will improve its testing capabilities with the help of robust testing tools from Mercury, the latter will learn from Wipro's valuable inputs on proof-of-concept and product development strategies.

The lab will showcase Mercury's product line and Wipro's testing abilities. While the base will be in Bangalore, the Wipro QA division has also replicated the lab in Pune.

According to Gangadharaiah C P, vice president, Wipro Technologies, "This CoE will primarily contribute towards building proofs-of-concept and generating best practices in automated testing, for our customers. We will be able to replicate various customer sites which will in turn result in result in product enhancement."

The centre will assist in enhancing verification and validation services provided by Wipro Interop Services Solutions Group. This group specialises in end-to-end testing services, test automation, certification testing and test process consulting.

"We are witnessing a growing interest in test automation and performance testing. The Wipro Interop Solutions Group has seen a robust growth and has over 100 customers engaging with us to meet their QA needs," Gangadharaiah added.

This announcement also comes at a time when Wipro just announced its decision to provide testing as separate service offering.

During a recent media interaction, Vivek Paul, vice chairman of Wipro Ltd, said, "We have reached this decision because our testing capabilities have reached a certain scale. It has grown 84 per cent year-on-year and over 90 per cent in the half year-ended September 30, 2004. This business is currently 2,200-strong."

Stating that it will eventually result in a better go-to-market strategy, T Srinivasan, managing director, Mercury India, said, "We will begin with erstwhile testing tools in the field of Application Delivery. This will graduate to QA for our Application Management as well as IT governance capabilities. This initiative is the first of its kind to Mercury in the Asia Pacific region and can be extended to our worldwide operations."