LTS QA

The world has witnessed unprecedented growth in the information technology market and IT outsourcing trend, which can be seen in almost every aspect of our daily lives. With its share in the “market pie” remaining with a steady rate prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, the year of 2022 will mark a new milestone in the IT field in general and in IT Outsourcing in particular.

Why IT Outsourcing Trend?

IT Outsourcing is a service that has long been on the market with a relatively steady growth rate. As in the IT Services Outsourcing Market Size, Industry Report, 2020-2027 of Grand View Research, the global IT services outsourcing market is projected to grow at USD 520.74 billion in 2019. The annual growth rate (CAGR) from the phase from 2020 to 2027 is expected to be 7.7%.

Taking advantage of the shifting market

For a minor field in Information Technology, IT Outsourcing Service shows potential, but this growth rate was not that dramatic for us to call IT Outsourcing a flagship point.

However, with the world’s economy brought into a sudden and screeching halt due to the pandemic, many giants in business have shifted their focus to virtual/digital engagement with their clients. 

Surging from the uncharted waters, these businesses have proven the viability and possibility of how digital transformation can save a fortune, or perhaps even bring their names to the top of the chain.

Learning from the big names on the market, many other businesses, from big fish to local store owners, all want to apply the technology advances in their operations. To these businesses, digital transformation is the crossing bridge to bring customers and their services closer, especially under the influence of the pandemic in which people prefer virtual interactions.

Take Amazon and Shopify as examples, we can see that the application of e-commerce platforms was spiking in the first half of 2020. These platforms, of course, aim at selling, while their approach is through applications and software. Amazon, or Shopify, has its own in-house development and QA team. But for mid-sized or small-sized companies, they just can’t afford the HR and operation costs. Under this circumstance, the industry is anticipated to witness substantial demand for IT operations so as to allow companies to focus on their core tasks and reduce operating costs.

Parallel to the core tasks, the marginalized tasks also play an increasingly important role in businesses that are planning to foster digital transformation. 

Since the businesses wanting to employ digital transformation have no foundation or background knowledge over information technology, the IT Outsourcing market is progressing owing to the ever-increasing demand for consultancy.

The talking numbers

As the pandemic continues to put a strain on the global economy, many businesses plan to transition to remote work and online customer engagement and order fulfilment. In order to cope with this new approach, they increase spending on clouds, especially software as a service.

Financial cuts in the circumstance of the pandemic are a must, but the reduction in IT Outsourcing has eased from $83 billion in the spring to $31 billion at the end of 2020, signaling the growth in the global IT spending.

Worldwide IT spending is projected to total $4.5 trillion in 2022, according to Gartner’s forecast, growing by 3% compared to 2021, despite that people tend to cutback spending on PCs, tablets and printers by consumers 

As in the first phases of the pandemic in 2020, every aspect of the IT service was declining, but it began to take the initial steps for a huge growth in the years coming. For example, after contracting 4.6% in 2020 to $490 billion, worldwide IT spending on consulting and implementation services are predicted to experience a 4.5% CAGR through 2024. While worldwide spending on IT-centric managed services, infrastructure, and application support, which decreased 1.1% in 2020 to $475 billion, will see a CAGR of 5.3% through 2024. 

What companies want from their IT outsourcing providers

Pre-pandemic, the main focus for IT outsourcing providers was narrowly on specific services such as helpdesk, infrastructure, storage, network monitoring and network management. 

Post-pandemic, with the preferred solutions for digital transformation stay on top in almost every business, the IT outsourcing services are demanded to leverage and innovate to cope with the urgent needs for a wider range of requirements.

Subsequently, the expected outcome for this whole IT outsourcing service is cost avoidance. To achieve this, IT outsourcing providers are to fulfil the needs for:

1. AI and Automation

The employment of 4.0 Technology is developing with the pace that we’ve never seen before, leading to an upsurge in the need for human resources and infrastructure. Thousands of applications pilot every day, each with many features that require timid, tedious work of coding, testing and maintenance.

To this point, businesses who want to be ahead of the curve have to take advantage of being the pioneer, meaning they have to be the fastest and the most productive. Instead of the traditional way of expanding the team with experts in the field (which can be quite costly), many of the business owners decide to go for a cost-effective approach, AI and automation.

The fascinating idea of AI – a non-human machine that can interact with people is on the rise. But the real benefit of this is to reduce HR and operational costs. For example, before assigning a customer to a human customer service officer, the system has a chatbot to answer and interact with them. Only when the bot cannot figure out the requirement and how to fulfil it do they transfer the customer to a CS. With the bot work regardless of time, the business can save a fortune on the cost for a CS team.

2. Growth of the Cloud Services

On-premise storage for data management has shown weakness and limitations, hence the IT outsourcing trend in shifting to cloud services. 

Alongside the current worth of cloud computing reaching the hallmark of $180 billion worldwide is the market growth by 24% of PaaS, SaaS, and IaaS sections. In two years’ time, cloud computing service is predicted to soar to over $623.3 billion. 

One of the reasons why cloud computing is on the rise is the better protection of data. Moreover, it also ensures faster data operations and the ability to modernize business processes.

3. 5G

5G wireless technology is meant to deliver higher multi-Gbps peak data speeds, ultra low latency, more reliability, massive network capacity, increased availability, and a more uniform user experience to more users. Higher performance and improved efficiency empower new user experiences and connect new industries. – Qualcomm

With the employment of 5G in almost every aspect of the IT world, it speeds up the adoption of reliability, low latency and larger network capacity. Alongside its emerging deployment in major aspects such as medtech or Internet of Things, 5G also plays an important role in the development of AI implementation.

For example, as the Covid-19 pandemic took its toll on the world, some 5G-based applications have already made their way into medtech, especially in the adoption of telehealth and remote monitoring. All of the wireless technology, powered by 5G, have benefited the healthcare staff with utmost convenience.

For the part of AI implementation, 5G is pervasive in domains such as autonomous driving, virtual reality and augmented reality. With higher connection density and the ability to handle an immense number of connected devices at the same time, 5G comes to the forefront as the pioneering factor for both cost avoidance and service enhancement.

4. Cybersecurity

There’s no denying that information technology advances are developing with upsoar rate, resulting in the ever-growing number of service end-users. Larger number of users equals larger threat of cybersecurity. 

To have a screw loose in the cybersecurity is to bring threats to the system, but to recruit a full-stack IT security engineer is no easy task. Instead of having an in-house staff who works full-time, businesses are leaning towards IT outsourcing. They often need:

• Monitor your environment 24/7
• Thorough security staff training
• Security strategy
• Security architecture

One report from Allied Market Research estimates the market to reach nearly $41 billion by 2022, based on a 16.6% compound annual growth rate between 2016 and 2022.

5. Remote Work Statistics

According to Weforum, “The number of days US employees spend working from home increased from 1.58 per week in January 2021 to 2.37 in June 2022”, as the result of Covid-19. The IT sector, among many other sectors, has witnessed the dramatic shift to remote work, marking a new IT Outsourcing trend in the IT outsourcing market.

Working remotely is not new, especially under the specific traits of how IT staff can work. However, the rate is increasing with soaring popularity.

A report by Avasant shows that middle-sized tech companies have been the largest contributors to the growth of the IT outsourcing industry in 2020.

It’s also declared that the average outsourcing for midsize companies went from 9.1% to 11.8%. So while some tech businesses increased their IT budgets on the brink of the pandemic, the rest continued to work with their nearshore and offshore IT outsourcing partners to reduce development costs.

Delve deeper into other technology trends and industry movement.

Find what you’ve been looking for? LQA to provides 24/7 consultancy for your support. Contact us now!

Do you want to take advantages of the current IT Outsourcing trend? Come and contact LQA for further details:

• Website: https://www.lotus-qa.com/
• Tel: (+84) 24-6660-7474
• Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/LotusQualityAssurance

 

For decades, Digital Technology has always been the playground for men, only in recent years that women decided to step up on the game.

Lotus Quality Assurance’s CEO – Mrs. Phung Thanh Xuan after years working as a Technology engineer, is now running her own Global technology firm with nearly 200 staff in five years. We are proud and honor to be leading by a talented, never give in & determined director.

Seeing that many more Vietnamese women are gradually taking on the challenge to break the “Gender bias” barrier in technology is proof showing that our society can change for the better, not only for women but also for men.

Thank you BNews for this interview on International Women Day. Hopefully, this article can inspire many more women to do what they love regardless of the gender stereotype.

We are thrilled to announce that Lotus Quality Assurance company has officially become the ISTQB Silver Partner.

ISTQB is the software testing certification board that offers the world’s most successful scheme for certifying software testers. The ISTQB® Partner Program recognizes organizations with a demonstrated commitment to software testing certifications.

Lotus Quality Assurance has triumphantly passed the essential evaluation, examination and was recognized as the Silver Partner of ISTQB. To hold the title Silver Partner, we have to satisfy ISTQB’s rigorous requirements in the number of certificates as well as the qualifications of testers in our company.

This accomplishment results from our constant training process of high-level testers with global standards. Our team of excellent talents will commit to provide top-quality testing services for every projects.

Becoming ISTQB Silver Partner is our first milestone to grow into the Global Partner in the future. This achievement strengthens our determination to become an international trustworthy QA partner who provides global-standard testing services.

October 18th 2020 marks the 4th anniversary of the founding of Lotus Quality Assurance. After 4 years, we have built ourselves a strong foundation; constantly improving our services and earned ourselves a competitive position in the IT outsourcing market.

Let’s take a look at our main achievements in our 4th year delivering quality to our clients:

In terms of human resources, we are now having 200+ members, ensuring quality workforce for projects under tight deadlines.

“The biggest asset of Lotus Quality Assurance is HUMAN” – Xuan Phung | CEO and Founder of LQA

In terms of technology, we have now successfully added more management features to our in-house developed tools – LQA Annotation, heightening the labeling quality for clients projects. Incremental changes are constantly added to improve team productivity.

In terms of expansion, despite the Covid 19 pandemic, we have successfully established our first subsidiary in Japan – Lotus Japan (LJP). Choosing the land of rising sun as our next destination, we aim to deepen our understanding of international clients; while also learning from the strict quality regulations.
Other than amplifying our international presence, LQA also decided to spend more efforts on the domestic market. So far, we have worked with leading clients in Vietnam from several fields: telecommunications, F&B and insurance etc.
We are trying hard to win in our home country, to be the number one QA firm in Vietnam.

In terms of awards and recognitions, we are pleased to be included in several listings:

• Top 10 Viet Nam software quality assurance company by Clutch
• AI Annotation Chaos Map 2020 in the offshore category, by AI Smiley

In the BOD speech, Xuan Phung, CEO, shared:

“As we are heading towards the new normal, the time could be the hardest for everyone. However, we are all in this together. We strive to become a world-class Quality Assurance Firm”

Today, our entire company would like to take this opportunity to thank all of you, our Lotusians and our customers, for your continued support over the years. LQA would not be the like it is today without your support.

Once again, THANK YOU for your support from all of us here at Lotus QA.

Cheers for the years to come!

We gladly announce that, on April 3rd, 2020, the first offshore branch of LQA/LTS named Lotus Japan (LJP) was officially established in Japan; after much expectation of both Lotusians and Japanese clients. The new subsidiary marks an important milestone in LQA’s international expansion.

Mighty ambition in Japan

The presence of LQA/LTS in Japan has been part of our strategy since the first day; as this is one of our main markets. Thus, opening a Japanese branch is our effort to respond to the rising demand on Testing and Annotation service in Japan.

Also, we want to have more chance to understand clients better by meeting directly with them instead of pure online communication.

Lots of hope and expectation

LJP is in Kanagawa prefecture – an ideal place for foreign companies in Japan. Last November, in a business event between Vietnam and Kanagawa, Mr. Yuji Kuroiwa (黒岩 祐治), the Governor of Kanagawa Prefecture, expressed his delightment to LQA’s existence in Kanagawa and the Government’s willing to help LQA/LTS for more years of growth in Japan.

This establishment could not have been successful if it were not for the help of the “Select Kanagawa Next” program and JETRO (Japan External Trade Organization); giving us infrastructural and legal support.

CONTACT:

Meet us at 2F, Industry & Trade Center, 2 Yamashitacho, Naka Ward, Yokohama, Kanagawa 231-0023, Japan or contact us here.

LJP will provide both Testing Services and AI Data Annotation Services respectively.

Continuing with the interview, this time, I want to ask Xuan about her personal life because I believe a a busy leader like Xuan are very good at work-life balance.

 

Thank you for sharing about the work you’ve done. May I ask about your personal life? What is your childhood dream?

When I was a little girl, I wanted to become a painter because my father was a painter. And he made a lot of wonderful pictures. When it came to decide which university to apply for, my father asked if I wanted to become an artist or an engineer. I chose to become an engineer and I did not regret the decision. I love to create technology and want to work full time for it while painting can be my hobby, which means I can paint in my free time.

 

What do you think your characters are?

Ummmm…! What a hard question! I think I’m the kind of person who never gives up, very ambitious. People around me also say the same.

 

 

Who do you respect the most and why?

This is another hard question. I respect everyone because they are different from me and I can learn a lot from these differences. But the person I respect the most is my mother. My mother is the leading example of a person who “never gives up”. My mother brought me up in a challenging situation but she succeeded in raising a great family.

 

What do you do on weekends?

I do two types of activities. To relax, I go out with my friends for a coffee or spend time with my children, or read books, go shopping, so on! I do many things that would make me happy and gain more energy for the new week. Apart from entertainment, I also do some work-related stuff such as reviewing and making plan for the new week. 

 

 

What do you like about Japan?

I like everything about Japan. The people, the food and the surroundings. The first time I’ve been to Japan, I got lost and an old man took me from the airport to my dorm. It was a long distance but he still offered to help me. I felt very lucky at that time. Japanese foods are also very delicious, and the environment is also very clean and clear.

 

Thank you for sharing your thought. Last but not least, I would like to ask about your typical day. As the CEO of LQA, I think you have a very busy personal life, I am curious how you can manage.

 

It’s boooring (smiley face). 

4:30: I get up then quickly check my work such as email, schedule of the day.

5:30 – 6:30: Go to the gym or studying Japanese.

6:30 – 7:30: I make breakfast and enjoy it with my family.

7:30 – 8:00: I take my daughter to school and go to office. 

8:00 – 18:30: Work. 

18:30 – 21:30: I make dinner, play with my children if I don’t need to go out for dinner with clients.

21:30 – 23:00: I work a little bit if have a conference calls or reading book.

23:00: I do some personal stuffs then go to sleep.

You’re such an early bird. What a hectic life! That’s not boooring at all (smile). I really admire you. Thank you very much for finding time in your busy schedule to have a talk with me. I wish you best of luck.

 

From this interview, I learn more about LQA and why LQA was able to grow that fast. I also understand more about Xuan a very passionate and thoughtful person. With Xuan san leading the company, LQA is on the road to success.

If you have not read the Part 1 of this interview, please check it out here. 

 

Watch our introduction video: LQA Introduction

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Lotus Quality Assurance (LQA)

Tel: (+84) 24-6660-7474
Email: [email protected]
Website: https://www.lotus-qa.com/

 

The New Year 2020 comes with a lot of plans and opportunities for LQA. Today, let’s have an interview with Mrs Xuan Phung – the ambitious captain of the ship LQA, to know more about LQA’s goals for this year as well as her life as a businesswoman. 

Happy New Year Mrs Xuan. Thank you for taking the time to talk to me. Firstly, can you share with me about your ultimate goal when you started the company?

We aim to make LQA a global Quality Assurance (QA) company. We want to provide talented QA engineers to companies worldwide. We also want to support clients in making a high quality software products so that the end-users can use it without any errors. Last but not least, I want to make LQA a second home for my teammates where they can continuously grow up professionally and have a happy life.

What were your difficulties when you started your company?

The first difficulty I met was finding the first client. In the beginning, there was only me, no staff.  I faced a lot of obstacles, but I became more familiar with tough situations. I think solving problems and dealing with difficulties are my actual job. At the moment, I don’t think of those challenges as difficulties but as part of my responsibilities to grow the company.

Could you share with me the strength and weakness of this company?

Our strengths are that we specialize in testing, and we spend time and effort in making our services better. Since LQA is becoming more global, the company can cooperate with testing companies in different countries to understand the specific quality standard in these countries. Our team are talented and fast learners with strong determination. Our engineers have international testing certifications (ISTQB). Furthermore, our staff can communicate in many languages such as English, Japanese and Korean. LQA’s weakness is that LQA is a young company, so there are many things to learn as we go. But we always try to learn from each other.

What do you think is the best asset of this company?

I think human capital, my teammates are LQA’s best asset because great staff make quality services and satisfy the clients.

Why do you choose Japan to expand the business this year?

Made in Japan becomes a famous brand representing high quality. We believe that  as LQA offer high quality products, we can also provide our services to Japanese customers. Moreover, I think Japan is a potential market for ITO (Information Technology Outsourcing) because the country lack of human resources, especially IT engineers.

The rest of the interview about Xuan will be published soon. Stay tuned!

Watch our introduction video: LQA Introduction

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Lotus Quality Assurance (LQA)

Tel: (+84) 24-6660-7474
Email: [email protected]
Website: https://www.lotus-qa.com/

“We enjoy working with LQA because of the high quality of their work and their flexibility in accommodating any new task. In the past year, we had a variety of different projects, from simple bounding box annotations to complex pixel-wise segmentation, and every time the team was able to perform the task according to the specification and within the agreed time frame. We are very impressed with the amount of effort the team put into understanding of precise requirements and making sure there are no grey areas in the task before starting the work. The work processes seem very smooth and well organised, making the interactions easy and predictable. So far LQA have been one of our best experiences when working with external annotation teams.” – Daedalean

“Daedalean (www.daedalean.ai) was founded in 2016 with an aim to specify, build, test and certify a fully autonomous sensor and autopilot system that can reliably and completely replace the human pilot. Currently the company is working with EASA on an Innovation Partnership Contract to develop concepts of design assurance for neural networks.”

If you have any difficulties in data collecting or data annotation for your projects, feel free to reach out to us!

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Lotus Quality Assurance (LQA)

Tel: (+84) 24-6660-7474
Email: [email protected]
Website: https://www.lotus-qa.com/

Data Annotation is the process of labelling the training data sets, which can be images, videos or audios. Needless to say, AI Annotation is of paramount importance to Machine Learning (ML), as ML algorithms need (quality) annotated data to process. 

In our AI training projects, we use different types of annotation. Choosing what type(s) to use mainly depends on what kind of data and annotation tools you are working on.

Bounding Box: As you can guess, the target object will be framed by a rectangular box. The data labelled by using bounding boxes are used in various industries, and most used in automotive vehicle, security and e-Commerce industries. 

Polygon: When it comes to irregular shapes like human bodies, logos or street signs, to have more precise outcome, Polygons should be your choice. The boundaries drawn around the objects can give an exact idea about the shape and size, which can help the machine make better predictions.

Polyline: Polylines usually serve as a solution to reduce the weakness of bounding boxes, which usually contain unnecessary space. It is mainly used to annotate lanes on road images.

3D Cuboids: The 3D Cuboids are utilized to measure the volume of objects which can be vehicles, buildings or furniture. 

Segmentation: Segmentation is similar to polygons but more complicated. While polygons just choose some objects of interest, with segmentation, layers of alike objects are labeled until every pixel of the picture is done, which leads to better results of detection.

Landmark: Landmark annotation comes in handy for facial and emotional recognition, human pose estimation and body detection. The applications using data labeled by landmark can indicate the density of the target object within a specific scene. 

If you have any difficulties in data collecting or data annotation for your projects, feel free to reach out to us!

On 19th November, LQA was honored to join “Kanagawa business seminar” – the significant networking event with the participation of Kanagawa government officials, Kanagawa and Vietnamese businesses.

 

Here, LQA CEO Xuan Phung had a conversation with Mr. Yuji Kuroiwa (黒岩 祐治), the Governor of Kanagawa Prefecture, to share with him about LQA’s plan to set up a Japanese subsidiary in Kanagawa. Kanagawa is an ideal place for the establishment, as it offers a range of advantages. In geographical terms, Kanagawa’s capital city – Yokohama, which lies on Tokyo Bay, in the Kantō region of the main island of Honshu, is a major commercial hub of the Greater Tokyo Area. The prefecture’s government also gives special preference to foreign businesses. 

 

 

Mr. Yuji Kuroiwa was delighted with this plan of LQA, and he believed that this would be a great step forward for the company. The government will be willing to help LQA so that the company can develop, achieve much success in Japan.