Endava is building new Data Capabilities by strengthening its partnership with Microsoft

The market’s growth and transition towards digital solutions accelerated during the last year, being boosted by the pandemic. The opportunities are too significant, and the critical factor is to establish the best partnerships with technology providers, use the best tools, and adapt to the swirling usage of technology that has one objective: to transform the world quickly.

Reimagining the relationship between People & Technology by accelerating the ability of its partners to take advantage of new business models and market opportunities by ideating and delivering dynamic platforms and intelligent digital experiences that fuel the rapid, ongoing transformation is a core direction, one of the leading software companies, with more than 8.800 employees worldwide – Endava.

And on how to do that, the company’s representatives are talking about leveraging next-generation technologies in its multi-disciplinary teams and providing a combination between Product & Technology Strategies, Intelligent Experiences, and World-Class Engineering using the Agile methodology of working. Now the focus is on Data.

The trend is a global one and was reinforced this July when the CEO Satya Nadella kicked off Microsoft Inspire with a “big thank you” to the technology giant’s 400,000 partners, calling them “the core to who we are and what we do as a company.”

Endava has developed a strong partnership with Microsoft for over a decade, based on multiple competencies, including Gold Application Development, Gold Cloud Platform, Gold Data Analytics, Silver Datacenter.

The company is a Tier 1 Cloud Solution Provider. It employs the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework, and the Azure Well-Architected Framework to create the most secure, high performing, resilient and efficient cloud infrastructure and applications for its customers and is certainly one of the major partners that Mr. Nedella was referring to during Microsoft’s largest event globally.

Endava has priorities resulting from the company’s client value proposition mentioned above: growing capabilities and enhancing competencies.

“At Endava, we always wear the innovation hat, our culture itself nurtures originality and ideation, and we’re keen on growing and enhancing our data competencies.

To follow this direction, we decided to run a new initiative: an OpenHack event about Modern Data Warehousing organised together with our Microsoft partners. OpenHack is a highly interactive program that brings together groups of developers to learn how to implement a specific solution, and that doesn’t look like a traditional workshop.

My colleagues from the Data discipline had to team up and work together to solve a real-world scenario in a fictional company. They followed a journey for building a complex data solution using Microsoft cloud stack, and they nailed each piece of the puzzle to unlock the next challenge.” explained to us Adriana Calomfirescu, Group Head of Data Delivery in Endava.

“The mechanic is simple: the 25 participants in this initiative from Endava, supported by four coaches from Microsoft, immersed themselves in a 3-day interactive virtual learning experience where they gained Modern Data Warehousing expertise and the approach very down to earth as to be successful and get the most out of this OpenHack, the participants had to understand relational database structures and concepts (e.g., tables, joins, SQL) and have experience with either SSIS or programming languages like Scala or Python.

For those not familiar with all these technologies, the participants were given a real-life scenario to solve, and they needed to use what they were learning to propose real-life scenarios for a company”, was to complete Sorin Peste – Senior Cloud Solution Architect, Data & AI Microsoft.

Learning by doing is not an approach that most of you haven’t heard of since it is a theory of education developed by American philosopher John Dewey in the middle of the last century[1]. He believed that learning by doing enabled students to develop their problem-solving skills. They could then clarify the learning and apply it in their future lives.

Although not new, this practice gained momentum again during our days, especially when capability building in a very short time is desired.

“This edition of OpenHack helped my colleagues from the Data team to evolve from “knowing” to “doing” in the strategic area of Microsoft technology stack” in only several days. Still, I am sure this approach would help us reduce the time of gaining and putting to use the newly acquired capabilities,” completed Adriana Calomfirescu.

In a world of constantly changing technology and a need to adapt very fast, we are sure that we will see such programs implemented more and more often. One thing is certain: the need to adapt new technologies will continue to become of the strategic directions for Endava and the entire market.

The way companies will manage to do that will be paramount to their success in one of the world’s most competitive markets.

  [1] https://www.thepositiveencourager.global/john-deweys-approach-to-doing-positive-work/