Cognizant Senior Engineering Leader Rajdeep Guha designs enterprise solutions with a customer-first approach
Cognizant Senior Engineering Leader Rajdeep Guha has more than 15 years of experience designing and building complex applications for enterprise clients. He boasts a successful track record launching new products, migrating existing workloads, driving digital transformation, and modernizing legacy business processes. We spoke with Rajdeep about the importance of taking a customer-first approach to realize business outcomes.
Describe a recent project you’ve worked on that you are proud of.
Rajdeep: My team is building a fully functional insurance policy admin system on Unqork for a US-based insurance startup. The MVP is live and we’re continuing to enhance the application and deliver more features.
One of the customer’s primary goals was getting to market as fast as possible with the least amount of overhead. It took us just under eight months to deliver the MVP of the app, and we’ve been building on top of it ever since.
The client is really satisfied with the return on investment. They don’t want to worry about things like infrastructure and code security. They specialize in the business vision and leave all the IT work to us.
What were some of the project requirements your team had to address?
One key requirement was integrating their software with various kinds of third-party platforms. All those specialized services help them run their business more efficiently. The stack includes everything from online payments and document generation to property verification and credit scores of their customers. It’s more than 20 different specialized third-party services at this point.
Integrations are a breeze with Unqork. We can securely integrate these different web services in the background to provide rich data for the client to make its business decision. It’s all seamless and invisible to the end-user.
How have your choices of development tools evolved?
I’ve been working with large-scale clients for over 15 years, and have worked on everything from host-based mainframe apps to cloud-based digital apps. Over the years, I’ve seen how the engineering process has evolved, and so have my development tools. With the advancement of technology, the sky is the limit for what value we can deliver to our customers.
Unqork is taking things to the next level by providing us with a blank canvas (a literally virtual blank canvas) and powerful tools… if you can imagine it, you can find a way to build it in Unqork.
Unqork is taking things to the next level by providing us with a blank canvas (a literally virtual blank canvas) and powerful tools. With the no-code platform, we can now build everything from a localized simple data-collection app to a more complex enterprise-grade application without having to write any code. In essence, if you can imagine it, you can find a way to build it in Unqork.
Have you tried other low-code or no-code platforms?
I’ve heard from colleagues that other “no-code” and low-code systems still require a fair amount of coding. With Unqork, I can deliver most of our business functions only using drag and drop components. So that’s a big win.
How familiar were you with Unqork or codeless infrastructure when you started?
When I first joined the Cognizant Unqork practice, I wasn’t yet familiar with Unqork or no-code and wanted to learn more. So I did some research, and Gary [Hoberman, Unqork CEO] showed up all over the internet. Among the various videos and articles that I found, one thing he said stuck with me was how he said that engineers should be like artists. In that vision, developers shouldn’t waste time thinking ‘how am I gonna deploy this code?’ or ‘How can I compile this?’ They should only think about providing value to the customers, not the technical steps in between. I like the idea of separating the final product from the code.
What parts of Unqork’s platform have been most valuable to you as a developer?
I love Data Workflows in Unqork. I used to get terrified with workflows! They never used to work as I wanted. But now that I’ve been exploring all the Data Workflow functionality, I can confidently say that it’s probably the most powerful component in Unqork.
The other thing that I really enjoy is RBAC. It’s so easy to isolate access. Security is a huge priority for a lot of our clients—they’re dealing with really sensitive customer information. They have a trust to live up to, and they expect the same from the platform they use. Our customers really enjoy how we can control access at such a granular level using Unqork. That’s definitely awesome.
Also, I’m very excited to get my hands on the new Dynamic Grids. I know that’s coming soon, and I can’t wait for that to be released. I’ve heard great feedback about the beta.
What moves has your team made to adapt to this new approach?
I have an awesome team who, like me, have prior code-based engineering experience. So we enrolled into the Unqork Bootcamps and trained on the platform together. We’re also building a resource pool of Unqork configurators within Cognizant because the demand has been so huge. Our leadership decided to proactively train batches of people so that whenever an opportunity comes, they can be deployed ASAP. Cognizant is a leading Unqork partner, and we can run our own bootcamps to train more and more people in Unqork. Unqork Academy and the Community Hub have been an excellent resources for us as well.
We’re also building a resource pool of Unqork configurators within Cognizant because the demand has been so huge.
What advice would you give to teams just beginning a Codeless journey?
Take a microservices approach. Think of the smallest unit and build those out rather than thinking of all the complexities of the whole application. Take one module at a time, build one API at a time, unit test those separately, do service-side executes and make sure they are doing what you want them to do. Eventually, integrate them into your application.
The other advice I always give my team is, don’t be afraid to build POCs. Great things come out of POCs; you learn so much by making them on the side. And if they look good, talk to your clients proactively to see if they would love to add this new feature. Collaboration can deliver a lot of value to the end-users.
Good luck and happy configuring!
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