Great quality costs less than poor quality. At least that’s the thinking at HyperQuality, a leading provider of third-party quality assurance. Better service means fewer contacts per issue and lower total handling times, higher overall customer retention, and increased up sells and cross sells. Founded in 2003, HyperQuality focuses on call-center operations, and evaluates millions of interactions annually between contact center agents and customers. It uses advanced analytics to generate actionable feedback to drive performance improvements. The company’s web-based suite of tools and services help companies objectively evaluate the customer care experience and provides concrete feedback on how to improve that experience. Its Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering is built on several Microsoft products and the Microsoft .NET Framework.

Here is our conversation with Jude Kavalam, CTO.

Microsoft Startup Zone: Why and when did you first choose the MSFT platform?

Jude Kavalam: I joined HyperQuality in March of 2007 with a fair amount of experience with Microsoft technologies. At HyperQuality most of the technology we were using then was open source. This was a great approach to getting started fast. It gave us the ability to get up and running and bill quickly. However, the open source technologies could not support our growth rate. Scalability, manageability, and performance were issues that were beginning to hamper our ability to deliver quality solutions. The Microsoft platform offered the quality and performance that we sought.

Since 2007 we have been gradually moving our production systems from Linux, MySQL, Java and PHP to Windows, IIS, SQL Server, and .NET. We are doing better on many fronts as a result of this migration—in addition to the robustness and reliability, we are particularly happy with the Microsoft development tools. It enables us to write higher quality software.

We leverage SQL Server features extensively. We depend on SQL’s Reporting Services and Integration Services. SQL has changed the way we create deliver the solution to the customer.

MSUZ: So the most important technology was SQL Server? Can you elaborate?

Kavalam: SQL Server and SQL Reporting are key parts of the makeover. We have realized benefits through performance improvements, better manageability, and the ability to create reliable and scalable systems. By using data-marts and SQL reporting we are able to meet our client’s demands by making the reports more flexible. We were not able to do this easily with MySQL. And while MySQL was good when were a small startup, the SQL Server is what we needed to scale to the next level.

MSUZ: Can you quantify some of the scalability or performance advantages?

Kavalam: Before we moved to the Microsoft platform, for example, while we were on Java and using Jasper reports, our reporting performance was, in most cases, terrible. It would take minutes for reports to show up. And now, we are frequently below 20 seconds, and in other cases we are below one second for the same report that took minutes earlier on MySQL.

We are also able to log and monitor performance real time and that allows us to find and resolve performance issues quickly.

MSUZ: What Microsoft technologies are you looking to support in the future?

Kavalam: There are many exciting directions that we are looking at—Workflow gives our application flexibility and helps us decompose our problem space into neat manageable and maintainable software solutions. Performance Point and SharePoint will be part of the Web-based delivery. WPF and rich clients are in our future. We are looking at providing customers with a much richer and robust experience than what we can give them with straight web apps. A tool in driving up the quality is training—we are evaluating Grava for our training modules and testing modules. We are looking at Oslo for managing our distributed solutions.

Those are some of the Microsoft technologies that allow us to create and deliver valuable solutions to the customer and help us continue to be a key part of their success.

For more, read the case study “HyperQuality Improves Customer Service—One Agent at a Time.”

Jude Kavalam's Background

Jude Kavalam brings over 14 years of Microsoft experience in software development and management to his position at HyperQuality. Prior to joining HyperQuality, Kavalam designed and developed stock market analysis tools as a senior team member at ClearSight Systems. During Kavalam’s tenure at Microsoft from 1991 through 2005, he was deeply involved with operating systems, databases, and advanced technology. He was responsible for program management of the OS Application Model Group and was awarded six patents in the area of application model on Windows and Internet Explorer. Instrumental in developing the user interface and browser integration of Microsoft's IE Versions 3 and 4, he also led the Microsoft team responsible for the successful port of the SAP R/3 from UNIX to Windows NT and implementation on SQL Server. Kavalam received his M.S. in mathematics and computer science in 1991 at the University of Denver. He also holds a bachelor's degree in business from the University of Bangalore, India.

For more information, visit HyperQuality.com online.