I’d like you to meet a couple of people – Sangeetha Rao and Rajiv Agarwal.
Not heard their names before? Well that’s about to change – indeed not only will you know them – you’re about to trust them. After all, if you have a Windows Phone 7 mobile and you download our Tesco Groceries app onto it, it’s their code you’ll be running!
So I better introduce them to you:
Image of Sangeetha and Rajiv next to their development machine
(photo taken by Vishwa Kiran)
Sangeetha and Rajiv are part of the Tesco.com Strategy and Innovation team based both at Tesco.com HQ in Welwyn Garden City, UK and in our development centre in Bangalore, India. It has been their considerable task to take Ribot’s design and make it real on Windows Phone 7. They did everything: XAML, C# code, multi-threaded architecture, the lot. What’s more they did it in record time to match Microsoft’s unmovable launch deadline and they delivered code of such a high standard that it passed Microsoft’s rigid phone testing procedures with flying colours.
Sangeetha and Rajiv are graduates from India’s exceptionally high quality university talent pool. Their thoughtfulness, intelligence, and passion to push the boundaries of innovation have really blown me away. I’m deeply proud that they have delivered such an exceptionally good app that Microsoft are saying that their phone can be aimed at Tesco shoppers.
Their boss (and mine), Vishwa Kiran, Head of IT Strategy and Innovation, has been deeply impressed too. In an email to the team Vishwa said, “A successful mission for the Innovation team. Great effort all around. Thanks and congratulations !!”.