The biggest indicator of an organization’s success is its people. At Tavant, we understand the importance of providing a challenging and fun-filled environment to our people. We believe that while learning is important, having fun while learning is even more important. Hence we provide the environment, culture and the opportunities for our employees to forge a path in their career. At Tavant, we believe employees ARE the organization and hence all our activities are driven by this primary employee-centric motivation.

Here is what one of our technical architects has to say about his experience.

“I am an architect (the coding type not the box and arrow type) with Tavant. I want to share my experience at Tavant with you.

I spent the initial years of my career working with a couple of MNC companies. I was frustrated on always having to work on the peripheral parts.  Even after putting in a credible performance and waiting patiently better work didn’t come my way because of the unspoken policy of not outsourcing critical parts.  It is with this backdrop that I joined Tavant. And I have not been disappointed.  I got the opportunity I was looking for.

I started working on an in house performance monitoring tool.  It was a great experience using some of the latest tools and technologies (aspectj / aspectwerkz etc) to build a useful tool. Apart from the actual implementation I was also involved in promoting it’s usage across Tavant. Collecting feedback from the users and deciding on the enhancements.  We finally decided to open source it as InfraRED and it is being well received (about 7000 downloads & 500+ posts on the forum). We presented a paper on our experience at AOSD 2006.

Another interesting project I worked on was evaluating Hibernate. This was 3 years ago when it was just becoming popular.  We did a thorough evaluation comparing it with Toplink & Weblogic CMP (the recommend option at that point). We came out with a recommendation to use Hibernate along with Springframework.  Created a training program and conducted trainings for the rest of the company. Defined best practices and helped the teams adopting it.  This became the de facto standard for all the projects implemented by Tavant.  As a bonus I also got to talk to the Hibernate founder and legend - Gavin King (we had taken a support contract with Jboss) to get a hibernate issue resolved.

I am currently part of the Tavant Warranty product team. We started about a year ago to create a version 2 of our warranty product.  The competition was tough, customers were asking for all the latest features – BPM, configurable rules, rich UI.  A small team (around 10 people) was put together. We were given complete freedom to pick the right tools & technologies as well as the process etc. Ofcourse, there were some basic guidelines (use as much of open source as possible) to adhere to. We decided to adopt an agile (iterative / incremental) approach, working closely with the domain experts. After 6-8 months of hard work we have produced something we are really proud of.  A very rich web application, that leverages the best of breed open source frameworks & tools (Hibernate, Spring, dojo, jBPM, Drools, webwork / struts2, mule, activemq, maven2 ..). It was also appreciated by the prospective customers as it provided end-to-end functionality that addressed their needs.  We have also strived to follow Domain Driven Design and build a rich domain model which would probably outlive the technologies we are using currently.  We still have a long way to go, but the journey so far has been an immensely satisfying experience.

With Tavant, I finally got an opportunity to put to use all the things I have learnt over the years and more importantly, lead a very capable team that can translate ideas into working code. 

It hasn’t been all rosy; I have had my share of problems. Having to fight for doing things differently, having to deal with all the constraints, having to deal with some of the non-technical issues.

This is my story, I am pretty sure that this is not true for all of Tavant, probably an exception rather than the norm. The important thing is that if you strongly believe in something and are willing to invest time in building the credibility and the results to back you, the opportunity exists to make way for it.

If your dream is similar to the one I had 3 years ago and you have the ability to back it up Tavant can offer the platform to realize it.“