A little about Raw Engineering

Raw engineering specializes in web and mobile application development, serving its clients with offices in San Francisco and in Mumbai, Maharashtra, India. The 35-person company is on a mission to solve the toughest web architecture and integration challenges. To that end, raw engineering has built its core development expertise in .NET, Java, PHP, Ruby on Rails, Mobile and related Web 2.0 and rich Internet application technologies. The company has built its reputation with highly qualified engineers, competitive rates and technical integrity.

Raw Engineering's Challenge

Raw engineering requires a collaborative project management solution for its application development projects. Up to 30 users working on 10 projects must be able to track bugs and quality assurance, among other tasks. In addition to a rich feature set, raw engineering developers want an application that is easy to use and integrates with third-party applications.

We tried a lot of different applications before Zoho Projects. Applications like Unfuddle, Assembla and Basecamp were just harder to use and didn't have all the features Zoho offered," said Nishant Patel, CEO and founder of raw engineering. "Zoho Projects is the right fit. And the integration with Gmail – which lets us create bug entries directly from Gmail – was a big feature that sold the team. That integration helps keep the whole team organized and in sync.

Zoho Solution

While raw engineering developers immediately recognized the value of the bug tracking, tasks, milestones, support, chat, and other Zoho Project features, the project wiki turned out to be an unexpected bonus. Company developers use the project wiki to maintain an internal knowledge base and to share documentation with clients. Questions and answers from the raw engineering user forums are also brought back into the wiki.

Other products are good in specific areas, but they didn't integrate as well with third-party apps like Gmail," said Patel. "And they weren't providing us with an end-to-end solution. From an admin perspective, it created a nightmare that had us managing three or four different web apps. Zoho Projects brought it all together for us in one solution that's really simple, fast, and responsive – easy to use and easy to administer.

As a web application development shop, raw engineering almost exclusively uses web-based products and has used Zoho applications prior to Zoho Projects. Starting about five years ago, raw engineering users began adopting Zoho online applications, starting with productivity applications such as Zoho Writer, Zoho Sheet, and Zoho Show.

The Impact

We've been following Zoho for a long time, said Patel. The world of cloud computing is something that we're following very closely as something that raw engineering specializes in for our clients. So using Zoho Projects, an online tool, to help improve our company and improve our project management overall is a huge validation of Zoho and the online philosophy. As a team, we're all using the same tool, and we're all on the same page and on top of our projects.