Challenge
Outcome
The Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA), the world’s largest vendor neutral IT certification program, is a technology industry trade association that offers technical education and online certification exams. To deliver its certification exams in a more efficient, streamlined and user-friendly manner, CompTIA needed to build its own secure, proprietary exam administration and simulation tools. And it needed to move development onshore without a substantial increase in budget.
A better concept, faster and cheaper
To select a vendor for its Simulations project – which would entail a cross-functional team developing the simulations within CompTIA’s exams – CompTIA solicited proofs of concept. As part of its POC, Catalyte developed TruJS, an open source platform to leverage other proprietary CompTIA technologies for this project. With this framework, according to CompTIA, “Catalyte delivered the best product, delivered it quicker and cost less than other vendors.” With a fully distributed team of onshore engineers, Catalyte delivered the full Simulations project at 51% of projected budget.
Working together to get past roadblocks
With the success of the Simulations project, CompTIA selected Catalyte to help develop its remote exam delivery platform. Catalyte developed against third-party code and provisioned the product for the cloud. As the project progressed, security and architectural complexity demands increased. For these demands, Catalyte provided CompTIA with additional resources to swarm the issue, resolve it quickly and return to a normal development schedule. As a result, CompTIA gave Catalyte the additional responsibility of all DevOps works for the project.
“When the project started getting rough, Catalyte was like a security blanket for us. The results from the deep and talented bench made us wish we’d added resources quicker.”
Value, communication and flexibility from distributed engineers
“Trust to me is more important than anything. Catalyte has never let us down in three years. They always deliver against time and budget. They communicated honestly with us, asking upfront questions that increased the pace of value delivery. And they provided the flexibility to work within the ways CompTIA does business. This built trust and allowed us to develop tools and platforms that touch our entire exam development and delivery program” – Randy Gross, CIO and EVP of cert ops at CompTIA
Key takeaways
Better/faster from the start
Software engineering value
Expandable resourcing
Long-term trust
“Trust to me is more important than anything. Catalyte has never let us down in three years. They always deliver against time and budget. They communicated honestly with us, asking upfront questions that increased the pace of value delivery. And they provided the flexibility to work within the ways CompTIA does business. This built trust and allowed us to develop tools and platforms that touch our entire exam development and delivery program.”
– Randy Gross, CIO and EVP of cert ops at CompTIA
Key technologies/skills
- JavaScript
- .NET
- React
- HTML5
- MongoDB
- AWS
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