How Xamarin Powered HCL Technologies’ Digital Transformation

As an Indian multinational information technology and consulting company, HCL Technologies needed to quickly become a digital organisation. The software services provider delivers next-generation technology that helps people to reimagine their businesses. But, with geographically dispersed teams, it needed to apply that thought process to its own operations. To increase agility and communications amongst its substantial workforce, it needed a way to streamline app development, improve user experience and encourage collaboration. Fortunately, the native app development capabilities of Xamarin and Microsoft Visual Studio allowed it to do just that. 

What Challenges Was HCL Technologies Facing?

HCL Technologies is a vast organisation with offices, innovation labs and delivery centres in 45 countries and over 149,000 employees. Its workforce, or ‘ideapreneurs’ as they like to call them, serve leading enterprises across key industries, including many Fortune 500 companies. As a company that helps others reimagine their businesses for the digital age, it should certainly follow that the philosophy should start with HCL Technologies itself. 

HCL Technologies knew that the only way to manage its huge workforce and the many different platforms and apps they rely on was to transform into a digital organisation. And as a company that focuses on customer relationships, the first relationships should be those between their employees and the tools they need to do their jobs.

Creating a centralised way for employees to communicate across different teams and locations isn’t an easy task. The company needed to implement a solution that would allow it to respond quickly to critical business needs and global mandates. It also needed to take into account how its workers use mobile apps and how they interact with enterprise applications. Ultimately, making critical information mobile would be an essential element of HCL’s business growth strategy. HCL soon realised the only way to drive agility and deliver anytime, anywhere access to information was to move all of its widely-used enterprise applications to mobile platforms.

As HCL put it, they needed to make ‘life simpler, interactions easier and decisions faster’. It’s a great mantra, but to create a next-generation enterprise workforce, they needed to empower their employees on the go, making them more productive, whatever the task at hand. 

Why HCL Technologies Chose Xamarin

To find the right solution, HCL compared numerous native and hybrid app development platforms. However, it was Xamarin that met the company’s needs for cross-platform delivery thanks to its advanced:

• User experience – application UI components are converted into platform-specific interface elements at runtime.
• Native-device features – unlike traditional hybrid solutions that use web technologies, Xamarin apps can still be classified as native with comparable performance metrics. 
• Shared codebase for Android and iOS – Xamarin delivers more than 75 per cent of uniform code across platforms
• Open-source software development kit – a series of tools that are customised for existing business requirements and future needs

Xamarin offered the right set of tools and technologies to enable HCL to execute the enterprise-wide transformation it required. They needed to be able to work in real-time, overcoming existing roadblocks and delivering projects faster. Xamarin not only enabled that but, thanks to its cross-platform development features, the company was able to reduce development costs across all operating systems. 

The Benefits of Xamarin / What Has Xamarin Helped HCL Technologies to Achieve

XCL Technologies realised immediate benefits from using Xamarin to move their enterprise applications to mobile platforms. Not least is the code-reusability factor. This alone has saved time and effort as code can be used across both iOS and Android platforms. However, it’s more than that; code reusability ensured that the implementation could take place simultaneously for all areas of the business. The company was able to deliver apps to help employees manage day-to-day business activities, create a one-stop solution for sales teams, provide analytics for managers and build an integrated customer view. 

The benefits don’t stop there; Xamarin has created a user experience that is near-native across all platforms. The native experience has been a huge advantage and has been extremely well received by the core users, the company’s hundreds of thousands of employees. And, with Xamarin powering development, the team can deliver faster iterations allowing user feedback can be taken on board and acted upon. All in all, the development team can work faster and smarter and deliver content more quickly and all at a lower cost than for native-development. 

Could Xamarin Help Your Business

Whether you work for a large or small organisation, Xamarin can help you to deliver a better experience to your customers and employees. By using Xamarin to help transform its business and move its applications to mobile platforms, HCL has created a simplified and unified application landscape. And, by integrating its applications and databases, it has saved time and money and delivered a better customer experience. Ultimately, having a shared codebase and taking advantage of an open-source software development kit can make all the difference to your digital transformation project. 

To summarise, here are the challenges, the solution and the results that HCL Technologies experienced:

• Challenges – HCL Technologies is a vast technology and consulting company with 149,000 employees across 45 locations worldwide. It needed to find a way to facilitate communications across its workforce, streamline app development and improve user experience. HCL soon realised the only way to drive agility and deliver anytime, anywhere access to information was to move all of its widely-used enterprise applications to mobile platforms.
• Solution – after comparing many app development platforms, HCL decided that Xamarin offered the set of tools and technologies it needed to execute its enterprise-wide transformation. Xamarin enabled the company to improve user experience, benefit from native-device features and save time, with over 75 per cent of the codebase shared across Android and iOS.
• Results – HCL immediately saved time and effort due to Xamarin’s code reusability. Implementation took place across all areas of the business simultaneously, with huge cost savings. The user experience they have delivered is near-native, and the development team can deliver iterations quickly and effectively. Ultimately, by using Xamarin to integrate its applications HCL has created a simplified and unified application landscape.