Innovation is required for successful delivery of high quality software and Encore considers this to be a key focus area. Our teams work on innovation in different areas such as Process Improvement, Software Development, Testing etc. Currently our innovation work has centered on building reusable software components that are used by our Delivery teams to speed-up the development process and reduce time to market. These components are organized at different levels of granularity and range from macro-level blocks for accomplishing single sign-on with Open Id providers such as Facebook to implementing triangulation algorithms for identifying geo-spatial targets.

Building these components alone are not sufficient, they have to be published and made available to our teams, to make the reuse program successful. We do that by creating a cloud based configuration repository which is accessible by all our teams. In addition we use Yammer for company-wide collaboration and establish architecture groups which communicate the latest developments on this front to all interested developers.

As part of the solution building process for our customers, Encore teams innovate by creating new tools and methods for solving complex problems – such as test automation tools for Rich Internet Applications such as Flex. These are part of the Intellectual property repertoire of Encore and are constantly re-factored to a higher standard of excellence by our engineers.

Converting our domain expertise into industry specific solutions is also part of our innovation efforts – for example browser based Visualization solutions for the Logistics industry that create executive dashboards for all stages of Shipment cycles. Encore engineers select the best technology set, a combination of COTS and FOSS technologies that help create the most cost-effective solution for our customers.

Our engineering teams also participate in coding competitions – notably the Data Analytics (Mining) competition hosted by Kaggle. Our teams competed effectively with industry wide talent and were in the top rankings consistently. We encourage ideation by having knowledge sharing sessions wherein teams working on cutting edge technologies periodically share their expertise with the entire organization through brown bag sessions, code discussions, and application demonstrations.