CompTIA

Fast results on key products lead to long-term trusted partnership

Developed critical platforms supporting CompTIA’s core revenue and business

Challenge

CompTIA needed a more secure, reliable and user-friendly platform to support its certification exam business.

Outcome

Surge – a Catalyte company provided the onshore, senior engineering talent CompTIA needed to build its proprietary, more secure and user-friendly online exam certification platforms and tools. Surge was able to do this at a fraction of the expected cost, while providing CompTIA with trustworthy consulting and the ability to scale as needed at a moment’s notice.

The Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA), the world’s largest vendor-neutral IT certification program, is a technology industry trade association that offers technical education and online certification exams.

To deliver its certification exams in a more efficient, streamlined and user-friendly manner, CompTIA needed to build its own secure, proprietary exam administration and simulation tools. And it needed to move development onshore without a substantial increase in budget.

A better concept, faster and cheaper

To select a vendor for its Simulations project – which would entail a cross-functional team developing the simulations within CompTIA’s exams – CompTIA solicited proofs of concept.

As part of its POC, Surge – a Catalyte company developed TruJS, an open source platform to leverage other proprietary CompTIA technologies for this project. With this framework, according to CompTIA, “Surge delivered the best product, delivered it quicker and cost less than other vendors.” With a fully distributed team of onshore engineers, Surge delivered the full Simulations project at 51% of projected budget.

Working together to get past roadblocks

With the success of the Simulations project, CompTIA selected Surge to help develop its remote exam delivery platform.

Surge developed against third-party code and provisioned the product for the cloud. As the project progressed, security and architectural complexity demands increased. For these demands, Surge provided CompTIA with additional resources to swarm the issue, resolve it quickly and return to a normal development schedule. As a result, CompTIA gave Surge the additional responsibility of all DevOps works for the project.

“When the project started getting rough, Surge was like a security blanket for us. The results from the deep and talented bench made us wish we’d added resources quicker.”

Value, communication and flexibility from distributed engineers

“Trust to me is more important than anything. Surge has never let us down in three years. They always deliver against time and budget. They communicated honestly with us, asking upfront questions that increased the pace of value delivery. And they provided the flexibility to work within the ways CompTIA does business. This built trust and allowed us to develop tools and platforms that touch our entire exam development and delivery program”

– Randy Gross, CIO and EVP of cert ops at CompTIA

Better/faster from the start

CompTIA initially selected Surge – a Catalyte company due to the speed and quality of its initial POC.

Software engineering value

Surge delivered a business-critical system at just 51% of the expected project budget.

Expandable resourcing

When needed, Surge flooded the projects with additional resources to bust through roadblocks and keep timelines moving.

Long-term trust

CompTIA has continually worked with Surge for six years due to high levels of trust and continuing performance.

“Surge delivered the best product, delivered it quicker and cost less than other vendors.

When the project started getting rough, Surge was like a security blanket for us. The results from the deep and talented bench made us wish we’d added resources quicker.

Trust to me is more important than anything. Surge has never let us down in three years. They always deliver against time and budget. They communicated honestly with us, asking upfront questions that increased the pace of value delivery. And they provided the flexibility to work within the ways CompTIA does business. This built trust and allowed us to develop tools and platforms that touch our entire exam development and delivery program.”