Three Indian firms make the global top five for quality assurance
As enterprise quality assurance (QA) practices evolve and become increasingly comprehensive, market research firm Everest Group has released a list of the best QA service providers in the world. Three of the top five on the list – Infosys, TCS and Wipro – are Indian IT services firms.
Markets across the world are digitalising, causing an increase in the number of digital products on offer as means of differentiation. With new products comes the need to ensure their quality, perhaps even more so with digital products, given their susceptibility to external intervention and the dire consequences usually involved therein.
As a result, consulting firms that are active in the IT domains have been rampant in their efforts to develop state-of-the-art QA practices. According to market research firm Everest Group, most IT services firms are upgrading their offering from testing on an individual product basis to a ‘brand assurance’ approach, involving the overall management of company outcomes.
Consultancies are developing what Everest terms as “end-to end QA orchestration” to clients, boosted by increased investment in artificial intelligence & machine learning as tools to conduct security, delivery, and performance testing for new digital products.
Using these trends as a foundation, Everest analysed 23 of the world’s leading IT service providers to determine which firms are performing particularly well in this new paradigm. The metrics used to identify the most promising services include the services suite of a firm, its scale of operations, and its domain investments, among other criteria.
All these factors are clubbed together into Everest’s unique evaluation tool, known widely as its PEAK (Performance, Experience, Ability, Knowledge) metric. Using this benchmark, US-based IT giant Cognizant emerged as the firm with the most effective QA offerings, based on its market impact so far, as well as its vision and capabilities.
In second place is India’s largest firm by market capitalisation, TCS, which has been substantially expanding its international operations. The firm has received a number of accolades and positive rankings this year, most recently being named the 58th most valuable brand in the US. Earlier this year, the Everest Group itself named TCS as the market leader in another segment of IT consulting – Software Product Engineering.
TCS was followed by global strategy and management consulting giant Accenture, which has been significantly expanding its IT services segment in recent times, in addition to an aggressive growth strategy for its creative digital capabilities. The next two firms on Everest’s list were Wipro and Infosys respectively, securing three out of the top five for Indian companies.
