siliconindia march 12 issue
TRANSCRIPT
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In My Opinion:Shibulal, Infosys
VC Talk:Sudheer K Kuppam, Intel Capital
In Conversation:DaveBelly,Intersil
Venkatesh Babu, CEO
GrowingalongwithPartners
TiaraConsulting:
BUSINESS & TECHNOLOGY IN THE U.S. & INDIA MARCH - 2012 SILICONINDIA.COM
PUBLISHED SINCE 1997
sil iconindia
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s i l i c o n
Changing Role of CEOBy Shibulal, CEO, Infosys
[Infocus]
[VC Chakra]
[CEO Spotlight]Varun Singh, ScaleArcRagu Bhargava, Global Upside
[VC Talk]Technology & Innovation t o wooIntel Capital
By Sudheer K KuppamManaging Director, Intel Capital
Internet is definitely here to stayBy Amit Patni, Co-founder andChairman, Nirvana Venture Advisors
06[In Conversation]S Raman, Managing DirectorLSI India
[Management]My Role As The CEO Of A StartupBy Paresh K. Patel, Founder & CEOVendScreen
[Entrepreneurs Talk]Lessons from my first venture
By Krishnan Ganesh, Founder & CEOTutorVista
[Business]IT is transforming Utility andPetroleum IndustryBy Juuhi Ahuja, President & CEOWise Men
[Technology]Top 10 2012 ResolutionsBy Benu Aggarwal, FounderMilestone Internet Marketing
[In Conversation]Dave Bell, CEO, Intersil
[Management]Enjoy Your Cricket And Manage YourTeam Successfully Too!By Shali Thilakan,Managing Director- India and South Asia, Cable &Wireless Worldwide
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[Rear View]The ABC of Big DataBy Gaurav Makkar, TeDirector (Office of CT
[Business]SMB Mobility an Oppobe MissedBy Anurag Agrawal, C
[Entrepreneur's corner
Getting Your First CusStartup: 4KTABy Naveen Bisht, BoaChair - Programs, The Entrepreneur (TiE )
[CEO Speak]Experiment and then cbusiness modelBy Rohit Kapoor, PresEXL
[CIO Insights]Business today is all asocialKumar Srinivasan, ChiTechnology Officer, Ba
[SI 20 Profile]
[View Point]Mr. Prime Minster, wewalk the talkBy Pradeep Shankar
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Contents March2012
COVERSTO
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GROWINGALONGWITH PARTNERBy Hari
TIARACONSULT
Venkatesh Babu, CEO
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Editor-in-ChiefPradeep Shankar
Managing EditorsChristoJacob (U.S)
VimaliSwamy (India)
Editorial Staff
BenitaMatildaHariAnil
SumanSVishwas Nair
Sr.Visualizer DipinDasVisualizer Hebert Emmatty
Subscription Manager P Magendran
M
ai
li
ng Ad
d
res
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MARCH - 2012
Editorial
CIO Not a Canary AnymoreI own the technology, you own the content. This is the
statement most CIOs have been making, when they meet their
marketing teams. But now, we are not going to hear this state-ment anymore, thanks to the growing trend of marketing team
acquiring IT capabilities in most enterprises.In the recent years the marketing methods in enterprises
have undergone a profound change due to the shift to the digi-
tal means. The rapidly changing consumer technology world,along with a huge helping hand from the Web, is fundamentally
changing how business gets done. For instance, the cloud is rap-idly becoming the way we deliver and receive virtually every
meaningful service today, from music, TV, applications, news,
phone calls, social media and many more. Moreover CIOs oflarge enterprises have started moving their IT and datacenters
outside their organizations. A combination of forces -- the moveto mobility, the arrival of a new generation of employees and
the BYOD (bring-your-own-device) trend -- is changing theworld of IT with a speed that might have seemed impossible a
few years ago.
In the coming years, with more and more different businessfunctions within the enterprises, companies would need a great
deal of new social, mobile, cloud-based, and customer-centricbusiness solutions. And most of them have realized that the only
way to get it is to have a mature management capability of theirown that understands long term technology, portfolio, project,
and vendor management. This transformation is going to dilute
the responsibilities of CIOs.A CIO trying to grab control of everything will never work
and his role is not going to be a role of canary in the organiza-tions today anymore. They need to understand the customer.
Innovation in the business must be built on a solid partner-ship between the CIO and CMO, with shared goals and metrics,
a common business language, and deep collaboration. If we aresuccessful in practicing it in our enterprises, conquering the
world of consumerization is going to be easy.
Please do share your thoughts with us.
Christo JacobManaging Editor
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The real change, which Ihave started to realize, is
that the buck stops at me.When you gradually transi-
tion, one cannot really make out
sudden changes.
We live in a world of contradic-tions. On one side you have the eco-nomic crisis, unemployment,
European crisis, uncertainty in theU.S., and lack of growth. On the
other side, there are tremendous op-portuniti es. Ther e are many emerg-
ing trends and in our case, it could
be creating opportuni ties arising outof emergence of digital consumer,
growth in emerging markets, newsustainable technologies, or change
in urban demographics. The role ofthe CEO essentially is to see which
of the opportunities to leverage to
create growth for your corporation.When I speak to CEOs of several
global companies, I see a di-chotomy. On one end is the lack of
confidence or clarity. On the otherend is the bunch of opportunities
that they are thinking to leverage.
This is the world in which most ofthe CEOs today operate.
Across the World, be it in devel-oped or developing economies, the
ability of Governments to create so-cial wealth and enhance the quality
of life is diminishing. The only enti-
ties other than Government, whichcan create social wellbeing, are
large corporations. Going forward,Corporates have a much bigger role
to play in the social wellbeing. It is
not just about profits and growth.They (corporations) are the custodi-
ans of most of the social wealth andthere is a responsibility to use it for
social wellbeing.We get impacted by events in the
corporate world more than the
events in the government world.
Given this context, the most criticalrole of the CEO is to drive holistic
performa nce. It i s no t ju st r evenue
and profit. It has different dimen-sions and it is about delivering per-
formance to all stake holders -clients, employees, investors and so-
ciety.
While driving performance,CEOs need to focus on building
trust with all the stakeholders. Weare in an environment where there is
crisis of trust. Any conversationabout corporations, it is all about
lack of transparency, exorbitant
compensation for CEOs, ethics ofrunning business, driving profits in
mindless pursuit. This needs to bechanged. Given the fact that the di-
rection of every corporation is set byits CEO, one of the most important
reasonability with the CEO is to cre-
ate an environment of trust betweenthe corporation and the government,
clients, investors, employees, andthe society.
Pursuing the ultimate mission todeliver performance, CEOs also
need to focus on innovation, strat-
egy and execution. At Infosys, webelieve t hat fiv e percent is s trategy
and 95 percent is execution. Strat-egy and Execution are meant to dif-
ferentiate you in the market, meant
to create business value for yourclients and are meant to create profit
for your corporationhave to be relevant to
tion deviating from wbe very difficult to m
to take it from an idea
CEOs have a vital rocreating a framework
which is relevant to thand relevant for your
vations have to flow irate strategy, its th
specific direction andtion has to follow, th
way you can create v
clients and for yourseTodays corporat
very large responsibistakeholders. We all
extremely challengindemanding and pretty
ronment. We need to
we need to raise the a
need to build trust aninstill confidents on th
s i l i c osilicon i n d i a |6|M a r c h 2 0 1 2
in myopinion
By S.D. ShibulalThe author is CEO, Infosys
S.D. Shibulal
Shibulal took over from Kris Gopalakrishnan as CEO of Infosys on August 21, 2011. Having been
for 3 1 ye ars a nd han dled the ro le of COO f or 5 years , the transi tion t o CEO for h im w as gr ad
than abrupt.
Ci Roe oCEO When I speak
CEOs of severa
companies, I s
chotomy. On ois the lack of c
dence or clarit
the other end
bunch of oppo
ties that they a
thinking to lev
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siliconsilicon i n d i a |8|M a r c h 2 0 1 2
in
Afirm headed by an Indian
American Dr. Birendra Raj
(Dutt) has claimed to haveachieved a breakthrough in Physicswhich will profoundly change the IT
world and cut down ever-rising de-mand for power in computing. The
breakthrough by the entrepreneur Dr.Dutt, an alumni of IIT Kharagpur
and the CEO of APIC Corporation,
in collaboration with a team of re-searchers at his own company; the
Massachusetts Institute of Technol-ogy and Stanford University will re-
sult in computer chips offering muchgreater performance at a small frac-
tion of current power usage.
The core of this breakthrough is
to get the element Germanium to actas a laser, for use as a light sourceon a new generation of mass pro-
duced silicon semiconductor chipsusing light particles or photons, in-
stead of electronics for its functions-i.e. photonic chips.
Dr. Dutt and APIC have teamed
with the College of Nanoscale Sci-ence and Engineering in New York
State (CNSE), with a plan of pro-ducing a fully manufacturable pho-
tonic chip in two years using thistechnology. "Both the scientific
community and industry have been
waiting for a breakthrough like this
and I am extremely proud of myteam. But I am most excited aboutthe practical effect on the world. We
will now be able to use photons formany of the information functions
that electrons have performed on sil-icon computer chips, drastically re-
ducing their power consumption
while supercharging their perform-ance. This could contribute im-
mensely to India's efforts to putmake online services widely avail-
able for the public, and especially inisolated areas," Dr. Dutt said.
Indian American achieves Breakthrough inComputing
Anand Srinivasan, a 15 year old
Indian American student had
the privilege to present hisproject before the U.S President,
Obama. He was among one of the fi-nalists at Google Search Fair, 2011,
who came up with a robotic armwhich is controlled by the users own
brain signals.
Srinivasan created a software pro-gramme which helps in recording the
bodys own electric signals, intens i-
fies them and then sends the signalsto the brain. He explained that, due toexternal noise it was not easy to iden-
tify patterns in the brain. His softwarehelps in getting rid of this noise from
the signal and sending a clear signal
to the brain .Thus, it enables the brain
to control the robotic arm easily.
I wanted to create a bridge be-tween man and machine, Srinivasan
told India-West.Srinivasan grabbed the opportu-
nity to have a discussion withObama on the use of a robotic arm
by wounded Iraq war veterans and
other amputees. This young talentedIndian American now moves on in
creating a robotic leg which can be
worn by people who are afflictedwith osteoporosis or arthritis as wellas amputees.
On the whole there were nineSouth Asian American youngsters
who were among the 55 teens who
participated in the second White
House Science Fair on 7 February.
The young talents were chosen fromthe winners of several science fairs
held across the U.S. last year. A fewof the participants were Shree Bose,
the grand prize winner at last sum-mers Google Science fair; Manasa
Bhatta, a regional finalist in the
Young Epidemiology Scholars com-petition; Miraj Rahemaputra, who de-
veloped an airplane wing which
maximizes fuel efficiency and en-hances performance; Prarthana Dalal,who won first place at the Interna-
tional BioGENEius Challenge for herresearch into potential treatments for
sickle cell disease.
Indian American Teen Anand Presents hisProject Before Obama
si
$ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $
California based desktop virtual-
ization company nivio raised $21 mil-lion from Videocon and AEC Partners.
We are proud that nivio has success-fully delivered 7x returns to some of
our angels in this round. The supportwe have received from our angels overthe last seven years has been unparal-
leled and without their support wewould not have got this far, says Dev
Duggal, Founder and Chief Wizard,nivio. The company was co-founded
in 2004 by Sachin Dev Duggal and
Saurabh Dhoot. The funds would beused for expanding its engineering ef-
forts in its Palo Alto office and to in-corporate the cloud platform across its
operating regions in Europe, MiddleEast, India, and Australia. Fictitious
nivio allows users to access a full
Microsoft OS in the cloud, at anytimeand anyplace, on any tablet, laptop, or
PC, and offers a s eam-
less syncing of files. Itsclients for iOS, An-
droid, Windows, andMac would be avail-
able in the later part ofthe month. Its Ubiquityclient delivers the en-
tire desktop over anyHTML5 browser, apart
from delivering theWindows OS and pro-
ductivity software from nivios cloud
to any device. This eliminates the needfor the users to download anything. Its
App Store lets the users rent their reg-ular desktop software on any screen,
with the nDrive providing upto 10GBof free storage.
We are very excited about this
space; especially as there is a sea-change happening in this industry
and across the board
sumer electronics and
and nivio saw this visiothe Cloud was even
Cloud. We are excitedture opportunities for g
presents to Videocon agic benefit to our exis
and services! says
Dhoot, Chairman, Vid
nivio Expands Engineering Efforts with $21 Million in F
California based
next generation logmanagement and ana-
lytics company, SumoLogic closed $15 mil-
lion in Series B round
of funding. The fundinground was led by Sutter
Hill Ventures in partici-pation from founding
investors GreylockPartners and angel in-
vestor Shlomo Kramer.
We believe that in-vestors see what we see in the mar-
ket: that as enterprises continue to
log data at expo-
nential rates, bothbehind the firewall
and across externalclouds, that data
will need to be har-
nessed efficientlyto deliver action-
able business in-sights, says
Kumar Saurabh,acting CEO and
VP of Analytics,
Sumo Logic.The current round of funding has
brought th e total fund rais ed by the
organization to $20.5 m
Logic plans to use thecelerate its engineerin
market activities. CoApril 2010 by Kumar
Christian Beedgen, Su
the next generation logand analytics company
Big Data for real-time With nearly 30 em
are poised for explosivare aggressively expan
velopment, sales, an
team they anticipawill be more than doub
of 2012.
Sumo Logic Secures $15 Million in Series B Fund
si
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silicon i n d i a |10|M a r c h 2 0 1 2 si l ico ni
ScaleArc is a provider of database in-
frastructure software that simplifies
the way database environments are
deployed and managed, and lowers
costs without any changes to applica-
tions or databases.
CEO Spotlight
Presently we are witnessing
explosive growth in bothstructured and unstruc-
tured data; this is matched by anequally rapid growth in cus-
tomer relational database envi-
ronments. This trend is resultingin a huge SQL scalability prob-
lem. Customers have limitedvisibility into their database
traffic and virtually have noability to respond to traffic in
order to quickly optimize data-
base performance.The database industry in
general is a slow change indus-try, but there has been a massive
upheaval in the last few yearswith the rise of NoSQL which
offers limited features, but bet-
ter performance. Due to contin-ued customer investment in
SQL databases, many vendorsare coming out with solutions
that seek to solve the SQL scal-ability or performance prob-
lems. ScaleArc is solving this
global problem differently thaneveryone else. We do not ask
customers to change their exist-ing architecture; instead we
focus on transparent database
simplification and offer a sim-pler, more efficient approach.
Entrepreneurs have always
faced the same challenges ba-
sically, run an efficient organi-zation, raise funding when the
timing is right, and make sure
your product and team are insynch. It is all about being able
to stay ahead of the curve onproduct development, making
sure that the product is address-
ing a customer pain point, andvalidating your successes in the
market.Now our main challenge is
finding and hiring the right peo-ple. We are i n a very services-
centric market, so finding
people who know how to buildan end-to-end solution is a very
difficult task. For example, weare looking to hire up to 40 new
employees this year, with about60 percent of those at our engi-
neering headquarters in Mum-
bai, and the remainder in theU.S. We are looking to hire en-
gineers with expertise in dataanalytics, data mining and in-
formation extraction, as well assome C, C++ and web develop-
ers who have done network ar-
chitecture development, loadbalancing and built code that
handles high-performance net-works, this is not going to be an
easy task.
Customer reception for ourproducts has been phenomenalboth in India and the U.S. so far,
and we are expecting this to
continue and we are really ex-cited about the future.
EntREpREnEuRs,It Is all abOut stayIngahEad Of thE CuRvE
Varun Singh
si
By Varun Singh, CEO, ScaleArcGlobal Upside is a finance and accounting services specialist with expertisein all aspects of finance, ranging from large-volume transaction processing to
strategic and technical accounting issues. The company offers their clients
scalable, cost-effective resources that execute their finance functions efficiently
and accurately.
CEO Spotlight
Today, companies expand in-
ternationally much earlier intheir life than they used to.
Many more industry verticals areglobal today than ever before. The In-
ternet makes it easy to reach markets
in distant parts of the world, so if acompany has a good product, it is
much easier to sell it all over theworld. However, global sales require
more manpower than traditional localor national sales. To sell in a foreign
country, a company needs people tohandle the regulatory, infrastructure,
and accounting issues and this makes
outsourcing increasingly popular. Fora company to sell in ten or twenty dif-
ferent markets, it is not cost-effective,or, perhaps, even physically possible,
to recruit the local expertise and sup-port local operations in all those mar-
kets at the speed of business. The best
solution is to outsource those needsand services to a specialist firm like
ours, with experience and expertise indoing business in those markets.
Outsourcing is becoming increas-
ingly popular with companies. Wefocus on the finance and accounting
area, but there are others who focuson recruitment services, staff man-
agement, product design and IT. Andof course outsourced manufacturing
is widespread and continuing to grow.
Today, when we think of an industry,we rarely think of one company that
can fulfill all of its customers needs.Even with giant companies like IBM
or Oracle rely on an ecosystem of
companies to provide the full pack-age that makes their technology use-
ful and valuable.The outsourcing business is be-
coming larger and more competitivethan ever before, thus entrepreneurs
need to stay on top of their games. Itused to be all about price in this busi-
ness, but now it is not enough to offer
services at competitive rates. An out-sourcing specialist needs to differen-
tiate itself on other parameters andwe have chosen quality as our key
differentiator. Consistent high qualityis not that easy to achieve or to main-
tain and to make sure we achieve this
every time, we have put systems,processes, and people in the right
places. I take a strong personal inter-est in making sure that our quality
standards are maintained. In the 13
years of our operating history, wehave never lost a client because of
quality issues, and I am determined tomaintain that track record. We oper-
ate in more than 30 countries now andin every single one of these markets,
we also provide persservice. This has been
ful for us. With new cliefinding that they have
perience with one of ou
where the price offer mattractive but the entir
and experience very fruwould go wrong. Whe
eventually surfaced afixed, and when they a
happened, they foundanswers to their questi
highly personal servicof our customers, and vresponsive service. O
tomers experience the way of doing business
of loyalty.
glObal ExpansIOnIs a thE ORdER Of thE day
Ragu Bhargava
si
By Ragu Bhargava, CEO, Global Upside, Inc.
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silicon i n d i a |12|M a r c h 2 0 1 2
TIARA CONSULTINGGROWINGALONG
WITHPARTNERS
A
leading U.S. coffee manu-facturer F. Gavia&Sons,
headquartered in Vernon,California, faced chal-
lenges in implementing an
integrated technology solu-
tion to enable excellence in their Trade Pro-motion Management. Being a coffeemanufacturer, they had limited technical
bandwidth to pull this off on their own andbeing a SMB they need to keep a tab on their
budget and could not afford t o hire a bigcompany to do this job for them. This is not
just the case of one company, this is the
trauma many small and medium businessesface in this changed world. In todays cut-
throat business environment any help a com-pany can get in terms of business
intelligence, trade promotion managementsolutions, customer relationship management
or enterprise resource planning will be a
blessing for their business. SMBs spend justover $2.9 billion in Business Intelligence
alone in 2011, an enormous percentage oftheir total budget. All of the giant players
have the ways and the means to spend mam-moth amounts on technologies but what
about companies like Gavia the small
and medium players, which do not have tens
of thousands of dollars to treat themselveswith?
Gavia was looking for a company whocan help them. That is when they stumbled
across Tiara Consulting. Tiara took on the
project without any delay and it marked the
beginning of a fruitful, mutually beneficialpartnership.Initially the company stepped-in to assist
Gavia with ERP SME (Subject Matter Ex-pertise) in Oracle E-Business Suite ( EBS).
Through its proactive approach in deliveringcustomer value, Tiara expanded its support
to the business team in advising changes to
business processes for adopting new tech-nology solution and helped in implementing
the integrated solution.Today Tiara is in-volved in advising solutions for handling
complex brand management and trade pro-motion business scenarios and also, enabling
excellence in their CRM systems for Gav-
ia.The integrity of Tiara team and theirstrong knowledge and expertise has helped
Gavia to achieve impeccable results in theimplementation of our trade promotion soft-
ware, says Marcia Ramos, Project Managerfor Trade Promotion, Gavia.
Started in 2006 by V.A Venkatesh Babu,
Tiara Consulting is a Global IT Consulting Venkat
COVER STORY
QUICK FACTS
Founder : Venkatesh Babu, CEO
Founded : 2006Headquartered : San Ramon, CAOther Offices : Chennai, India & Singapore
Employees : 75Customers : 55
Website : www.tiaraconsulting.com
By Hari Anil
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silicon i n d i a |14|M a r c h 2 0 1 2 sil i coni n
firm that specializes in delivering proj-ect based IT solutions and services in
business intelligence (BI), CRM, ERP,business applications, quality engi-
neering and emerging technologies.The company specializes in bridging
the gap between business and technol-
ogy through its ability to correctly un-derstand the business processes and
needs of their customers, and offeringthe correct solutions using BI, CRM,ERP and web technologies. The best
part for SMBs is that the company isoffering solutions tailor made for
them, to fit their needs and constraints.We are very clear on how we want to
reach out to the customers and how we
want to grow. Being a small startup,right now we cannot go ahead and
market our products to Fortune 100customers, doing that will be like try-
ing to pull a mountain using a smallrope. We are concentrating on smaller
players who we can grow along with,says V.A.Venkatesh Babu, Founder,
President & CEO, Tiara Consulting.
The BeginningWhen the company started back in2006 it started as an ERP subject mat-
ter expertise provider. The manage-ment of Tiara knew the importance of
trust in a companys customer rela-tionship; they also knew that this trust
can only be built by offering impecca-ble services and the company concen-
trated on this. Time proved this to bethe right strategy and approach.
By providing very high quality
services the company managed tobuild the trust factor among its cus-
tomers and that helped them to attaingrowth that could not be attained oth-erwise. The trust factor made their
customers to start asking them to ven-ture into more and more services.
When the demand came, we realizedwe have the potential to help our
clients beyond ERP, says Babu. The
company has come a long way sincethat, and now it is nothing short of a
premium offshore partner for productengineering, for many of its clients.
From its inception onwards Tiaraflaunts a partnership based approach.
This has helped the company so far inits journey. For example, it started as a
consulting service provider for Perva-
sive Software, a leading data integra-tion company based in Austin, Texas.
Tiara earned the trust through its serv-ice excellence and process optimiza-
tion, and transformed the businessrelationship into a long lasting part-
nership. Within the past three years, ithas become one of Pervasives pre-
mium partners in several areas such asproduct engineering, quality engineer-
ing, product implementation and serv-ice support. All the services done for
Pervasive and its customers are exe-
cuted 100 percent from Tiaras off-shore development center in Chennai
and therebybringing cost ef-
fectiveness into
the businessequation. As atrusted partner,
Pervasive relies
on Tiara to de-velop new con-
nectors andupgrades to exist-
ing ones on theirp r o p r i e t a r y
framework. Presently Tiara is also the
sole distributor and market develop-ment partner of Pervasive in India and
helped Pervasive data integrationproducts reach out and sell to some of
the leading companies in the market.These customers include some of the
large multinational banks and few ofthe giant BPO players in India.Tiaras strength in delivering high
quality services with agility using aglobal / offshore model has helped to
expand our business partnership intodifferent areas, says Lance Speck, VP
and GM of Integration, Pervasive
Software.Cloud computing has opened up a
sea of opportunities to companieswanting to embrace latest technolo-
gies. Arguably, cloud gave birth toSaaS, pay-as-you-go, and PaaS mod-
els and this has made many technolo-gies affordable to the SMBs. But the
issue is that, since the development
and growth of cloud happened veryfast, there are only a very limited num-
ber of players in this space. Yet, Tiarahas already established its presence
over the cloud and today the companyis providing both on-premise and
cloud based integration solutions andcloud based CRM solutions using
Salesforce.com, Oracle CRMOD, Net-Suite and MS Dynamics. By provid-
ing services on the cloud the companyis not just standing out among its com-
petition but also is providing its cus-
tomers all the advantages andflexibility that comes along with
cloud.
The Tiara Advantages
In the past five years, the company hasstrengthened its capabilities by forging
partnership with global leaders such as
Pervasive Software, Oracle, Right-
Now, Salesforce, Microsoft, IBM,TALLY Solutions and grown its busi-
ness multi-fold across diversified busi-ness segments and geographies with
its corporateheadquarters in
San Ramon, Cali-
fornia. It hasoffshore develop-
ment center inC h e n n a i ,
India,and busi-ness operations
spread acrossU.S., UK, UAE(Dubai), Singa-
pore and India.The scarcity
of IT solution providers is severelyfaced by SMBs throughout the world,
yet it is more severe in growing
economies like India. Indian SMBsstruggle as not many companies pro-
vide services to the small players, allthe providers are targeting MNCs that
operate within the nation. Again, Tiarais a boon for them. The companys
main concentration is on the domesticmarket too. The services that it pro-
vides come with pay-as-you-go model
and so are very affordable for the SMBplayers. We understand the issues
faced by the small and medium busi-nesses in the country, we are commit-
ted to bringing value back to thecountry and are very focused on this,
says Babu.The company also provides its cus-
tomers with training in proprietaryproducts. This is not a very common
service that many companies provideto their clients. The advantage that
Tiara is providing to its clients by
doing this is unparallel. This also ce-
ments the already strong bond andtrust between the company and its
partners. The company believes inbuilding strong relationships with its
customers so as to develop long term
partnerships with them. It provides ut-most transparency in its conduct and
its global delivery model comes with acost advantage.
Since inception, Tiara has been fo-cusing on serving the booming IT
needs in India. Towardpany formed a long-te
with TALLY Solutions TALLY Sales, Service
Partner. Within one yenership, it won more th
customers in India. It w
time that the automobIndia mandated that a
from vendors have to bcertified. Most of the
using Tally, which did
barcode solution.The vcomply with the manlooking for companies
vide this service for the
as the sure winner in thiis the first Indian compa
Tally bar code. The comneed early on when o
tomers came and asked
its prominent Tally devguage expertise the c
ahead, did the research it so that all of its custo
efit. We have also bui
ment for Tally. Now ouraccess Tally from any w
This is the biggest drivpand Tally project in I
have a mobile applicatsays Babu.
Tiara Account Team for Pervasive:
Venkatesh Babu, CEO and
Lakshmi Kalyani P. Venkatesan,Tiara
Director,Strategic Accounts and Account
Executive for Pervasive, presenting on
Integration Excellence at Pervasive
Europe Summit, London.
Lance Speck, VP and GM, Pervasive
Software, and Venkatesh Babu, CEO,
Tiara Consulting at Pervasive Integration
World Europe Summit at London.
Tiara CEO at Gavia headquarters with
Fernando Herrera, Brand Director,
Gavia and Marcia Ramos, Gavia
Project Manager, Trade Promotion
Management.
The company has
strengthened its capabilities
by forging partnership withglobal leaders such as
Pervasive Software, Oracle,
RightNow, Salesforce, Mi-
crosoft, IBM, TALLY Solutions
Tiara CEO with
Gavia CRM Team:
Lisette Gavia Lopez (far
Director, Gavia, & Miche
(middle), Gavia CRM Pr
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silicon i n d i a |16|M a r c h 2 0 1 2
Word of mouth publicity comes as
a byproduct of good customer rela-tions and it has worked miracles for
the company in its run. Many a times,its customers have introduced or re-
ferred the company to some of its part-ners who in time became the
companys clients. The main advan-tage for word of mouth publicity is
that a level of trust is inherited by the
new customer from the existing cus-tomer.
Another key differentiation thatthe company provides to SMBs
abroad is the onsite offshore model.Even though they want the cost arbi-
trage that comes with offshore part-
nership, most of the SMBs tend not totrust their work with players who do
not have an onshore presence. Withoffices in California, Singapore, and
India, the company has managed totake away this fear from many of its
clients. Customers can directly be in
touch with Tiaras office in theircountry and still get the benefits of
off-shoring. This provides the clientswith a sense of security. It delivers its
services across the world in a globaloffshore delivery model with major-
ity portion of the work delivered by
our offshore delivery team located inChennai, India. The company is also
establishing their presence in the UKmarket thus enabling the trust factor
in the Europe as well. More than that,it offers offshore model for projects
as short as two weeks. Due to this, the
customers can save up to 70 percentof the cost even for smaller projects.
Not many players in the industry pro-
vide this.
FutureThe company has been growing atmajor league pace since its inception
and it is expected to continue in thefuture. It considers its dynamic, self-
motivated group of professionals asits backbone and the management
makes sure that this team stays happy
and motivated. In order to ensure this,the top management spends a lot of
time with the employees, understand-ing their needs, solving their issues
and helping them in any aspect theymight need help in. The organization
flaunts a flat hierarchical culture,
where an employee does not have tojump through the hierarchical loops to
reach the senior management. An em-
ployee who wantsto talk to the senior
management can goahead and do this in
person or overemail or phone.
This makes our
employees feelcomfortable and
valued. They knowthat they are recog-
nized as an integral part of the com-
pany and feel appreciated for thevalue that they are providing to thecompany, says Babu.
The company believes in trans-
parency and has made it a policy toreach out to the employees with the
information of companys growth. Asthe CEO, Babu sends a bimonthly up-
date regarding the companys growthand any other key updates to the em-
ployees. The management believes
that this helps to keep the employeesmotivated and informed. Apart from
competitive remuneration packagesand great work environment, the com-
pany also provides its employeesmaximum opportunity to stay current
and updated with the latest develop-ment in the industry. This is an areaI am focusing much on. I always
make sure that our employees stay up-dated and get proper training in all the
new and relevant technologies in theindustry. We organize training ses-
sions for our employees on a regular
basis, says Babu. All these factorshave contributed in building the
highly qualified, tightly knit talentpool that the company has today.
Tiara seems to have big plans forthe future. The company has grown in
an exponential pace so far and themanagement team is expecting this
growth to continue in the future. Our
aim is to double our revenue everyyear. In fact, our budget this year is
two and a half times our budget lastyear, says Babu. The company also
has plans to establish offices in Ban-galore and Delhi this year.
Tiara India Delivery Team at ChennaiTiara Management Team at India
(From Left): R. Vengadesh, General
Manager, Asia Pacific and A.T.NaveenPrabhu, Director, Technology Solutions.
We understand the issues
faced by the small and
medium businesses in the
country, we are committed
to bringing value back to
the country and are very
focused on this
si
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silicon i n
silicon i n d i a |20|M a r c h 2 0 1 2
Imagine trying to put together a1000-piece jigsaw puzzle without
having seen the picture first. How
difficult would that be? For most peo-ple, putting together the puzzle with
the picture to compare to would bevery challenging in itself and it would
be virtually impossible without any-thing to compare against.
Building a company from the
ground-up is like putting together ajigsaw puzzle. The CEO must have a
vision for the company and mustclearly be able to visualize what the
puzzle looks like. The CEO mustalso be able to articulate that vision be-
cause he or she will rely on other peo-ple to move the pieces into place. The
CEO must be able to live in a reality
where the puzzle is complete, eventhough pieces will not be in place yet.
However, he or she has the confidencethat all the pieces are there, and it is
only a matter of time in finding theright piece for each part of the picture.
At the highest level, I view my role
as the CEO is to inspire the vision and
connect the people with resources toexecute that vision. The fundamentalrole is about having a vision and then
getting resources the time, tools,money and so on to the right people
who can execute the vision.
A day does not pass where I do notwork or think about this central part of
my role as CEO. I need to be able to
not only anticipate where the industryis headed and what the customers will
seek, but also how the company willexist in that marketplace.
Often times, I must challenge theassumptions that are widely held by
others in the industry as well as oth-
ers working for the company. In astart-up that is chartering new terri-
tory, it is imperative to understand thatthe vision or the r eality we seek does
not exist yet. This is almost a paradoxfor the CEO he or she must be able
to see the vision (the completed jigsawpuzzle) and understand it without hav-
ing the benefit of ever having seen it.
The people moving the pieces haventseen the puzzle either, but the CEO
must lead as if he has seen it.Hence, this is the challenge of
being a CEO of a start-up.The successful CEO can envision
the future reality and create it at the
same time. This takes a remarkable
skill that only a small percentage ofthe CEOs actually possess. And theones that do will create highly suc-
cessful enterprises. This is what I, aswell as CEOs of most startups, aspire
to do.
My ROlE as thE CEO Of a
staRtup
In Conversation
si
By Paresh K. Patel, Founder & CEO of VendScreen
Paresh K. Patel is the Founder & CEO of VendScreen, which produces An-droid-based touchscreen for vending machines. Founded in 2011, by Pateland Glenn Butler, VendScreen personalizes the vending experience by de-livering the nutrition data and advertising to displays mounted on vendingmachines. The company had recently secured $12 million in funding.
Management
Whats the biggest driver for LSI
today?
LSI, as you know focuses on storage and
networking market. In these two mar-kets, we are the most trusted provider of
technologies and are leading the way forcompanies. The key word here is trust.
When we deliver our products to lead-ing OEMs, we have to make sure the de-
livery is on time, with the highest levels
of quality. The products that we deliverhave a life of 7 to 10 years. It takes time
for trust to be established within yourcustomers and this happens when make
sure that we not only enhance the fea-tures of a product, but also ensure relia-
bility and quality. Talking about trends,
we are now focusing on the wireless in-frastructure, because the new industries
are very dynamic with newer technolo-gies deployed. So, in terms of chal-
lenges, I would say our focus has
always been higher complexity, lowerpower, and better features from a prod-uct point of view. In terms of product
behavior, we look at products being
early to market and those with highquality and reliability
How is India as a market today, for
LSI?
India is definitely a growth area.
There is a lot of demand for data and
storage, which is fueling a tremen-dous amount of growth. The semi-
conductor association is projectingthat by 2020 the semi-con industry
alone will be worth $40 billion. So, itsure is a huge market and there is a
big consumption that is projected.
Hence, the more India and Chinagrow, the more growth we see. This
in turn is a positive sign for us.
What are the technology trends you
are seeing today? How is LSI posi-tioned there?
We supply leading technology to our
customers who are participating in
these trends in a big way. For exam-ple, if we look at the infrastructure of
cloud computing and the deploymentof these large data centers and also the
public and private cloud, there is atremendous amount of storage and
networking infrastructure that goes
into that. And that exactly is whereLSIs focus is on. We always look at
how we can differentiate the productsand solutions here in LSI.
What are the interesting activities
that are happening in R&D centerhere?
When we talk about semi-con industry
we are not just talking about siliconchips alone, but there are other aspects
also involved in it. There is a signifi-
cant amount of firmware and multiple
players of software that goes with it.When comparing these solutions we
develop today, as to what was beingdone earlier, there is a huge amount of
complexity that is seen. And this bringschallenges in terms of design, the abil-
ity to comprehend, verification, vali-
dation, and making sure it is doingwhat it is supposed to do. And defi-
nitely LSI is engaged in doing such
leading edge product developments. Todesign a product that successfully andreliably runs for many years, are the
engineering challenges we see in LSI.
The innovative spirit continues tobe nurtured in India. One of the unique
things that we are doing in LSI is apatent initiative across all the teams in
India. Here we lay continuous empha-sis on why it is important to disclose
patents, which helps companies tomaintain the product leadership and
how it helps the overall growth of the
company. So, we need great talents, asgreat talents develop great products. It
feels great to be surrounded by lot ofsmart people at LSI, where we get to
learn a lot from them. With technologybecoming more and more complex, the
ability to grasp the things is going to be
determined by the technological ex-changes we make. Thats what we
would like to experience in LSI.
lEadIng thE way In
nEtwORkIng andstORagE spaCE
si
LSI Corporation (NYSE: LSI) is anelectronics company based in Mil-
pitas, California that designs semi-conductors and softwares thataccelerate storage and networkingin datacenters and mobile net-works.Santhanakrishnan Raman,
MD, LSI India R&D shares histhoughts on the opportunities he isbetting on.
Santhanakrishnan Raman
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silicon i nsilicon i n d i a |22|M a r c h 2 0 1 2
First stint as an Entrepreneur
My first venture was IT&T. During
the initial years of my career in thehardware industry, I came across
customers who faced issues withthe maintenance of their computer.
This gave me the idea to start
IT&T. I think my biggest learningfrom this was managing the cash
flow successfully. The companysinception happened during a period
when neither venture capital nor
angel funding was popular, neitherwas the services industry (whichwas our business model). It was
also a period when only manufac-
turing businesses were mushroom-ing and their requirements were
different from the services sector.At that point we did not think about
monetization or raising money. Thewhole focus was on paying em-
ployee salar ies at the end of the
month. IT&T taught me that for anentrepreneur it is not about
EBIDTA (Earnings Before Interest,Depreciation, Tax and Amortiza-
tion), EPS (Earnings Per Share), orprofit margins , b ut a bout having a
positi ve cas h flo w. If at t he end ofthe month, I have cash to pay allmy expenses, then I have a suc-
cessful business; if I delay salariesor vendor payments, then it is an
unsuccessful business.
What I Learnt
My first venture taught me that be-sides managing cash flows success-
fully, one also needs to select theright co-founders and partners. At
IT&T, I had five partners with dif-ferent backgrounds. But over time,
we had to buy the shares of a cou-ple of partn ers, as there were dif-
ferences. That taught me the need
to choose partners carefully andalso to build a strong team, right at
the beginning. In my subsequentventures, I took care in selecting
the co-founders and partners, and itwas a great experience as I part-
nered with the right pized that it is importa
founders with diversecan meaningfully ch
other, rather than aagreement.
I also learnt the i
having a sound businUsually when you st
you always start withexcitement. But it is e
tant to build a busine
objective. Without thais difficult to exit, sctize any business. I d
in my first venture,
subsequent ventures, on the goal and we p
wards it.
Turning the Constr
vantages
When you are an entr
learn very fast aboutexpected situations.
days, in the initial moscouting for our first c
tomer. As a startup, counwilling shift the
maintenance from names like Wipro and company. One of th
companies wanted tofice as a part of their e
due diligence. Duringfact that we have jus
office and one teleph
up. But we positionethat we offer just si
contact, one phone ntheir problems, will n
call on hold (there wfor call holding), and
transfer their calls (thtercom system to tra
to). This became a m
tiator, since none of thpanies could promis e
and we won the contrlight hearted way,
how you can turn yoto your advantage.si
Entrepreneurs Talk
Krishnan Ganesh, the Founder and CEO of Tu-
torVista, and the CEO of SMARTHINKING,
shares his experiences and the lessons he learnt from
his first venture.TutorVista is an online tutoring
company which was founded in 2005. Both these
companies are part of the Pearson Group
(NYSE:PSO, UK: PSON), a global leader in educa-
tion, teacher training, education technology and
school solutions.
It provides online tutoring at affordable prices,
and has a tutor base of over 2,000 teachers across
India, U.S., UK, Australia, China, and South East
Asia. Apart from online tutoring, it also provides
Test Prep Help, Homework help, Supplemental Tu-
toring, and gives assistance to the students before
their tests and exams.
Prior to founding TutorVista, Ganesh had
founded IT&T (acquired by iGate) and Cus-
tomerAsset (acquired by ICICI and now publicly
listed in India as FirstSource Solutions). He was
also Chairman, investor and advisor in the Data An-
alytics BPO firm Marketics till March 2007, when
the company was acquired by the NYSE listed WNS
for $63 million.
Apart from founding and succ essfully growing
the four ventures, Ganesh has worked as the CEO
of Wipro/Bharti British Telecom - a British TelecomJV in India, and held senior management position
in HCL Ltd. In a candid chat with siliconindia,
Ganesh shares his experiences and the lessons
learnt from his first venture.
leo rom
M fir vere
Krishnan Ganesh
It is important tohave co-founderswith diverse skillsets who can
meaningfully chal-lenge each other,rather than alwaysbeing agreement.
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silicon i n d i a |24|M a r c h 2 0 1 2 s il i coni n
Smart Grid
Utility industry is seeing a transformation like no other.
Over the last 100 years very little has changed in the waypower is distributed and consumed. The Power distribution
grid is in desperate need of upgrades to meet the currentdemands and maintain its reliability. Since grid infrastruc-
ture is difficult to change, complex to maintain and up-
grades takes a very long time, significant investments needto be made to make the grid scalable for next 100 years.
With the advent of consumer driven generation, these de-vices need to be plugged into the grid and consumers can
play the role of generators. Power generated needs to bemeasured for billing and settlement purposes, a significant
change compared to current processes.
Utility industry, often compared to telecom industry hasnot evolved and does not leverage the technology to im-
prove the service and lower its costs to operate. The differ-ence is in the rate of transformation led by adoption of the
technologies. Telecom industry deregulated long time agoand the competition in the market led to faster adoption of
the newer technologies. The Utility industry on the other
hand operated as regional monopoly, utility companieswere paid a fixed percentage of the cost as margin and as
such didnt have any incentive in adopting new technolo-gies in order to reduce cost and improve customer satis-
faction.
Whats next?
Newer technologies will be adopted and the pace of change
will be unprecedented. Some of the major reasons for thisrate are the aging grid infrastructure and major power out-
ages resulting in billions in losses and interrupting the econ-omy. This change impacts more than just utility company,
it will impact generation, wholesale and trading, retail andmost of all the consumers. Similar to the wireless industry
transformation with the advent of iPhone and other smartdevices, Smart grid initiatives will change the Utility in-
dustry and power consumption. Consumers want to meas-
ure and monitor what they purchase. They want choicesand mobility and save money at the same time.
Current processes for utility company and systems will
be completely outdated. Existing busi-ness processes and systems will present
massive inertia impacting their ability tochange in a timely fashion. Major in-
vestments need to be made to upgradethe entire grid if consumers need unin-
terrupted power supply. These initiatives
are termed has Smart Grid Initiatives. Atypical SmartGrid deployment usually
incorporates multiple functionalitiesranging from network management, out-
age management, SCADA operations
and a host of other functionalities. An-other core component in SmartGrid de-ployments is AMI/Smart Meters. These
meters are usually installed at the cus-
tomer premise (both industrial and com-mercial) and participate in a 2-way
communication with the utility company.These smart meters emit huge amounts
of critical information on a very frequentbasis that can be used in creating trouble
orders at much faster rate compared to
traditional manual entry/IVR.A leading electric utility distribution
company, planning to replace existinglegacy applications to support the Smart
Grid initiative and is working with WiseMen Solutions. The project termed as
Advanced Distribution ManagementSystem (ADMS) encompasses a wide-range of applications that need to ex-
change information in an effectivemanner. This system is at the heart of
Smart grid technology and has bi-direc-tional information exchange dependency.
The goal of the project is to devise an in-
tegration architecture that is standards-based, scalable, and agile in adapting to
future changes. This approach deliversimmediate business benefits.
Markets for Utility Smart grid SOAand software integration infrastructure
which were at $169 million in 2008 areanticipated to reach $1.7 billion by 2015
(Winter Green Research). Utility Enter-
prise IT Spending for Smart Grid is fore-casted to reach $8.2 Billion by 2015,
according to New GTM Research Re-port. Wise Men believes there is a signif-
icant talent shortage in this arena and isgearing up for ground up growth.
Petroleum Industry Data Exchange
(PIDX)
American Petroleum Institutes com-
mittee on global electronic businessstandards in the oil and gas industry
recommends the PIDX format for fa-cilitation of electronic commerce.
PIDXs vision is to achieve petroleumindustry and enterprise-wide integra-
tion of business processes through
seamless electronic business communi-cation. PIDXs mission is to influence
the architecture and facilitate imple-mentation of effective standards and
processes for electronic business com-munications within the petroleum in-
dustry community. PIDX leverages the
inherent value in existing EDI stan-dards as well as actively pursue the
benefits of emerging e-Business tech-nologies. A leading oil field servicing
company has engaged Wise Men Solu-tions to implement PIDXs vision of
achieving petroleum industry and en-
terprise-wide integration of businessprocesses through seamless electronic
business communicatiproject was to impleme
voicing out of the clientsuch as an ERP system
which can readily suppocustomers, and GeoMar
zations global operatio
the foundation for B2Band meeting point for th
ties in the field, such as eators, IT developers, ex
of electronic invoicing
these solutions companreduce their days sale(DSO) and generate m
their business with the
ceivables. An added atomating leads to labor
Whats next?
PIDX technologies wi
adopted at ERP level budevise level and the pace
be unprecedented. Som
reasons for this is the raof devices at user level
focus on UI. This changthan just Oil Company
Wholesale, Trading andMarkets for PIDX
gration infrastructure haa $100+ billion annual ement marketplace. PIDX
reengineered entire busand operations for gre
and profitability (PIDX committee). Wise Men
is a significant talent s
arena and is gearing upgrowth.
A majority of the Wtele in Oil & Gas, Energ
dustries have SAP, OracIT Systems, Wise Men
gration of above cutting gies with the core IT sys
high performance comp
analytics and MobilityMen has also been activ
community work in Hohas been recognized by
ing vendor who helpedefforts of gulf coast oil s
Business
Wise Men, based out of Houston TX, is a leadingIT Solutions firm focusing on industry verticalssuch as Energy & Utility and Oil& Gas sector.An award winning Women and Minority ownedbusiness, Wise Men has recognized by Inc 5000as one of the fastest growing companies in theUS and one of the top 50 locally. Wise Men isowned by Juuhi Ahuja and has two divisions;Wise Men Consultants and Wise Men Solutions.Wise Men Solutions division is headed by
Deepak Chandwani who is a 20 year technol-
ogy industry veteran and focuses as extensiveexperience in developing IT Solutions verticals.Wise Men helps its customers implement cuttingedge technologies such as Smart Grid Initiativesand PIDX eInvoicing, and ERP solutions.
It i rormiutIlIty and pEtROlEuM IndustRy
Juuhi Ahuja
By Juuhi Ahuja, President and CEO, Wise Men
With the increasingpenetration of smartphones,mobile broad band networksand innovative 'connecteddevices', mobile will play a fargreater role in healthcare inboth developed anddeveloping countries in thefuture. The provision ofpervasive mHealth services andapplications worldwide could
provide mobile operators withrevenues worth approximately$11.5 billion by 2017.
Courtesy: GSMA
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s i l i c o ni nsilicon i n d i a |26|M a r c h 2 0 1 2
By Benu Aggarwal, Founder, Milestone Internet Marketing, Inc.
Technology
In 2011 search engines made signifi-cant changes to the algorithms to im-
prove the quality o f search results forthe consumers. As an online marketer,
staying on top of all the latest changescan be a daunting task. The key to stay-
ing relevant is creating content across all
channels that your customers value. Theten tips below give a strategic path to en-
suring that your marketing efforts havethe best possible ROI in 2012.
1. Site/Content Freshness, Relevancy
After several algorithm updates in 2011
especially Googles Panda updates andseveral Bing updates search engines
have confirmed that they give a higherrelevancy to websites with fresh content.
Site Freshness Score
Any webpage is given a freshness score
based on when search engines first in-dexed it. This score can boost the content
for certain search queries and declines as
the content ages. The frequency andamount of content changes makes a big
impact on the score.
Which type of content makes a differ-
ence?
Bottom-line: sites that change more often
by adding val uable, time sensitive infor-
mation have a big impact. News sitestend to rank high due to their fresh and
timely content. Link from a site, whichhas a high freshness score, is more valu-
able than from a static site. A sites fresh-ness score can be influenced by a new
page, post or by addi ng news wor thy in-
formation and not by just adding/chang-ing keywords on the page.
What does this mean for businesses?
Make sure your site platform is built to
scale, and offers features such as blog,
polling feature, contest, and revi ews foruser engagement so that you can keep the
content of your site fresh.
2. Focus on Improving User Experi-
ence site Usability Enhancement List
Although technical SEO elements such
as on-page tags, headers and many moreare very important, ultimately it is the
users experience with the site that mat-ters. Positive user experience is now a
part of se arch engines rank ing factor.
Site Usability Enhancement List
Site owners should pay special attention
to site / page bounce rate, site downloadspeed, browser and platform compatibil-
ity, site crawl rate, deployment of richsnippets and semantic tags on the site and
site analytics to understand user behav-ior with their site. Check to see if your
site is programmed in HTML5. Use toolssuch as Page Speed by Google and Yslow
by Yahoo! to check cruci al site perform-
ance metrics. It is a great idea to put to-gether a handy list of site improvements.
Site improvement is not a one-timeevent; it should be checked and adjusted
almost on a monthly basis.
3. Using Mobile Effectively.
The mobile market is growing signifi-cantly. According to eMarketer, US mo-
bile commerce sales (inclu ding travel )increased 91.4 percent to reach $6.7 bil-
lion. The number of mobile buyers willnearly triple by 2015. Over 40 million
access social networks daily via mobile,
and eventually there may be more mobileweb users than PC users by 2015.
Most of the mobile searches are localand last minute in nature. People are
using mobile platform to check-in, for
social sharing, multimedia sharing
such as photos, songs etc. Voicesearch engines such as Apples Siri
are helping in increasing mobilesearch engines queries.
Check to see if you are promoting
effectively on Mobile platform
Businesses should start paying seri-
ous attention towards mobile. Theycan incentivize their customers by
offering mobile specific coupons,check in specials, run paid ads for
mobile-specific campaigns etc.There are several reasons a businessshould create a search friendly mo-
bile site in 2012 if they have notdone it yet. If you have a mobile
site, chances are your site will showup for queries coming from mobile
devices and the conversion from a
mobile site will be better by offer-ing customers precise content such
as click to call, maps, and ease ofbooking off ers right away.
4. Leveraging hyper local Chan-
nels
With the growth of mobile phones,geosocial and hyperlocal sites have
become lucrati ve channels to con-nect with a local target audience.
Businesses should leverage some ofthe most popular UGC/hyperlocal
channels such as: Yelp, Google+,Foursquare, Facebook, etc. by offer-
ing mobile check-ins, offers and
tips. Businesses can associate use ofan offer with physical locations.
Customers can use Google+ busi-ness profiles or Yelp or any other
profi le t o ch eck i n an d re deem of-fers on mobile devices. Customers
can choose to share check-ins pub-
lically, keep it private or share itwith their circle of friends.
5. Maintain a Handy List of Most
Valuable Local Citations/Links
and Perform UNAP Audit
Local citation and links are still im-
portant r anking fact ors. Quant ity ofcitations is considered the fourth
most important SEO factor for local
search ranking. Businesses shouldsecure local citations, listings, and
links regularly and establish the cor-rect URL, Name, Address, and
Phone Number (UNAP). Users often
find multiple listings for same loca-tion on map results due to one busi-
ness having different URLs orphone numbers . Ensuri ng UNAP
consistency greatly helps in rankinghigh in local search results.
6. Cross Channel Optimization
We are seeing higher ROI for busi-
nesses who diversify their promo-tion efforts across other search
channels. Check your webmasterlogs for keywords driving the most
traffic and optimize other channels
such as local, paid, and social forthose keywords. Content calendars
can be used to plan a strategy fordifferent channels.
7. Social Media Marketing Plan
Targeted and Planned Approach
Social media is now an integral partof search. Search engines have con-
firmed using social signal as part oftheir ranking algorithm. We strongly
recommend developing an inte-grated social media marketing plan
which should include informationon: which target channels and why;
what goals you are trying to
achieve; your target audience; andthe type of content needed to con-
nect with this target audience; etc.
8. UGC Rating and Reviews
Product and services with reviews
have higher conversion rates. As a
business, getting reviews on diff er-ent UGC channels such as Yelp, Tri-
pAdviso r, Google and your site isimportant. Search engines now in-
clude quantity of reviews as part oftheir ranking factors. Users make
their decisions based on quality of
reviews. As a business our job is tolisten, engage, respond, and solve.
9. Deals, Offers, C
contest.
The US economy is fconsumer confidence b
are looking for deals,offers across all cha
Social, Groupon and
media deals sites are number of transaction
What does this mean
Deals and offers do no
deep discounting. Busconsider offering pac
all channels. Value-a
deals help improve gagement and trust. D
offers also receive psearch engine result p
10. Google+, Maps, V
Search
Businesses should sat
nels. It is easier to do
and image search asweb search. Leveragin
nels leads to a significadditional website tra
the crucial steps are: oages and videos on yo
ing search friendly K
creating a place to Google+ business pr
creasing every dayworlds top 100 bran
Google+ pages. Gstarted to impact paid
have further impact o
in 2012 since Google+1 button next to all
recommend creating Gness profiles along w
social profiles. Some tion strategies includ
with customers and cr
etc.We all know that i
complish all the resofor any business. How
tent efforts towards 2012 resolutions wil
very positive ROI foline marketing activit
ResolutionsTop 10 2012
Milestone Internet Marketing is
a full-service Internet marketing
company exclusively for the
travel industry. Milestone has
been providing online hospitality
marketing and consulting
services since 1998. They work
with over 1000 hotels, resorts
and travel clients to design
websites and market and
promote their properties on the
Internet and currently drive over
$500 million in annual revenue
to their clients.
I C i
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silicon i nsilicon i n d i a |28|M a r c h 2 0 1 2
Innovating new business models
We are one of the leaders in high performance analog andmixed-signal ICs, and are present in 35 global locations,
which include 17 design centers. At present the company is
clocking revenue of $761 million (2011). We offer a broadrange of analog and mixed-signal products for power man-
agement, analog and mixed-signal, and consumer products.In the past decade, the company has grown, both organically
and inorganically, having made several acquisitions, andwidening its product portfolio.
In the semi-con industry, one would either find a fables
company or one with fabs. But we have come up with aunique model called the asset-lite and its manufacturing
benefits include, access to advanced technologies, special-
In Conversation
ized technologies that are retained in-
house, flexible capacity, and reducedrisk. We are focused on developing more
integrated and intelligent products that
simplify customers design process.
Key growth drivers to bet on
Semi-con industry is a very wide one, but
we have narrowed our focus by identify-ing top 10 growth drivers, which are ac-
tive cables, audio, automotive, dense
power conversion, digital power man-agement, digital power modules, PC
power management, pico projectors, op-tical sensors, and security surveillance.
For high performance digital powermanagement, we are adopting patented
Zilker Labs digital-DC technology. It can
be easily configured for a range of sys-tem requirements. There is a high level
of integration and embedded intelli-gence, as well as PMBus interface. In-
tersil developed the worlds firstencapsulated digital power modules. A
complete power solution, it has the con-
troller, MOSFETs, and all discrete com-ponents.
The company has a complete picoprojector chipset solution as well that
supports LED and laser-based systems.Native green lasers are now enabling
scanned laser systems. The company hasalso witnessed a large growth in pico
projectors. While three million units
were shipped in 2011, 58 million unitsare forecasted to be shipped in 2015. Pico
projectors will soon be embedded innotebooks, smartphones and tablets.
In automotive, the company is fo-cusing on affordability, connectivity, ef-
ficiency, and safety. Trends include
Li-ion multi-cell balancing and monitor-ing, start-stop system power, LCD dis-
play processors, ambient light sensors,and D2Audio premium sound. Among
active cables, consumer products are de-manding higher data rates. There are
higher resolution displays, such as HD,
WXGA, as well as faster I/O like PCIeand upgrade to USB. More power is re-
quired for faster charging.
In dense power conversion, we are
creating extremely dense DC-DC con-verters, with controllers and power
MOSFETs. High switching frequency
with smaller external components is re-quired, as is advanced packaging with
a stacked die to minimize package foot-print. Optical sensors is another interest
of area. The highest performance unitsare looking at devices that match human
eye response, have best infrared rejection
and lowest power consumption. A vari-ety of sensor functions include ambient
light, short-range proximity, and long-range proximity (up to two meters).
User-presence detection and non-contactgesture recognition are opening new pos-
sibilities.
As for audio, Intersil has been pro-viding amazing audio such as sound
bars, docking stations, home theater sys-tems, and automotive infotainment. The
DSP+ClassD amplifier is a single chipsolution. In PC power management, we
have 70 percent share in notebook Vcore
power. It has optimized solution for allplatforms desktops, notebooks,
tablets, and ultrabooks. F
rity surveillance, we havethe leaders in video dec
rity surveillance. The new
simplify DVR design. Ifunctions include securit
(SLOC) and Fisheye len
Focusing on the India M
India will be the worlds f
sumer market by 2015.
consumption is likely to over 20 years, with 54 pe
dians being under 25 yeathe second most favored
foreign direct investmeworld.
Intersil is targeting k
India automotive temanagement and
defense/mil/space powhigh speed, ADC solution
vices, and international dfor direct application sup
ence design support. Th
design houses segmentworth $16.8 billion, grow
of 17 percent by 2020. ments in India are the VL
bedded software board/hardware design, r
The Intersil India cente
Though we have just s
management team now, in India since 2004, with
galore. Later we acquirHyderabad in 2007. Cur
40 employees with Ramas the MD. Over the yea
product developments h
by the India team. The 4has been designing state
performance analog VLing product developme
collaborating with the FAto serve the Indian mark
As of now, the focu
a strong sales and partnincrease the presence
customers here. si
Intersi l Corpor ation (NAS DAQ: ISI L), is a
global technolo gy company, specia lizing in thedesign and manufacture of high performance
analog semiconductors. Based in Milpitas,
California, Intersil has had a continued focus
on leading in attractive high performance
analog markets while increasing
profita bility and cash flow; provid ing it a
sustainab le long-t erm mode l for suc cess.
Intersil began its transf ormation into a high
performance ana log company in 2003, with the
divestiture of its wireless business. Its products
address three of the industrys fastest growing
markets flat panel displays, optical storage
(for CD and DVD recordable products), and
power manage ment. Its leade rship product s
include amplifiers, analog front ends,
communication interfaces, data converters,
digital potentiometers, display solutions, DSLsoluti ons, optica l storag e product s, power
management products, power sequencers, real
time clocks, smart batteries, switches/MUX's,
VoIP products, and ICs for military, space and
rad-hard applications.
Eori e iio orIisemicocor Mre
Dave Bell
Worldwide mobile datatraffic will increase 18-foldover the next five years,reaching 10.8 exabytes permonth - or an annual run rateof 130 exabytes - by 2016.The expected sharp increasein mobile traffic is due, inpart, to a projected surge inthe number of mobileInternet-connected devices,
which will exceed thenumber of people on earth.
Courtesy: Cisco Visual NetworkingIndex
In a recent visit to India,Dave Bell, CEO, Intersiltalks about expansion plans in India, setting up a focused India
center and the plans to penetrate the Indian market.
M t
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silicon insilicon i n d i a |30|M a r c h 2 0 1 2
Management
to the team. His creativity plays an im-
portant role in inspiring the team tostay afloat during hard times.
THE CONSERVATIST - Playing the
game the traditional way; he might beseen by some, as bordering on the bor-
ing. He may not accept or adapt to rad-ical changes in the workplace initially.
He remains calm in the face of adver-sity, but you know you can depend on
him to deliver the goods when it mat-
ters.
THE FUTURIST - At some stage,
you have already earmarked your suc-cessor. But till then, there are those
small chinks in the armor that needfixing. Take him under your wing
when a crisis strikes, and you know
you are making an investment for thefuture.
THE BULLS AND BEARS GUY He frustratingly seems to have his
back to the right things in life at times.His career graph reads inconsistency.
Count on him to deliver and he disap-
points; and when you least expect it,SMACK, he has everyone running for
cover. Hone him, motivate him; hewill soon bloom into a fine, depend-
able professional.
MR. EQ - The guy whose heart rules
over his mind, but you know that hecontinues to deliver value to the or-
ganization and is a vital cog in your
team. Help to channelize his emotionstowards common team objectives, and
presto, you have a hero for all occa-sions.
MR. DEPENDABLE A completeteam player, one you know can be
handed complete responsibility of that
large customer who demands strict ad-herence to service level agreements,
and your man is always spot on.
THE PERCEIVED WEAK LINK-
A team is only as strong as the weak-
est link. It is important to shield himand protect him, because you know
that he is not that bright, eager-to-
impress guy who will always have hishand up during strategic meetings, but
the one who might just drop into yourcabin later that day and blow you
away with a brilliant idea.
THE SPOTLIGHT JUNKIE An
extremely talented individual; love
him or hate him, but you cant ignorehim. You can see that hes trying too
hard at times. You want him in yourteam and you need him in your team.
Yes, he behaves like a spoilt brat, butyou are clearly aware of the sheer
magic he is capable of.
MR. NICE GUY Your 4 a.m. guy,who will only be too eager to help the
team with something in the middle ofthe night; hes the one who makes
you want to spend more time withyour team.
THE JOKER Not to be confused
with the Heath Ledger type; ofcourse, he is your man
to lift the saggingteam morale during
difficult times. He willbe the guy who brings
in some comic reliefduring an intense busi-
ness discussion.
YOURS TRULY Itis important to come
to terms with yourown style of function-
ing before you startstamping your author-
ity over business mat-
ters. Always consultand have immense
faith in your team todeliver the goods. You
need to take ownership
go awry, but for everytcan pass it on to your t
All this looks good
till the team goes on a dral. Client payments no
time, no new customelast quarter, etc., and ev
out to hunt you downmedia is going for D
right now. Persevere!
well in your favor oncannot go wrong so dr
all cricket lovers proclTemporary, Class is Pe
Henry Ford, FoundMotor Company, onc
concept of Teamwork i
points: Coming togetning; Working togethe
Achieving together isvesting time on your t
you reap rich dividendbe aligned to your c
and help you chart th
tinued success. si
Last year, the world watched in rapt atten-
tion, a lad from Ranchi and the captain ofthe Indian cricket team lift the World Cup
after 28 years. Would you believe if some-one told you that Mahendra Singh Dhoni started off
in school playing football, and that he was oncepushed to represent a local cricket club by his foot-
ball coach? He impressed everyone with his wicket-
keeping skills and the rest is the stuff that dreamsare made of.
The media went from town to town praising thenew Messiah of Indian cricket, Captain Cool. But
surely, he didnt win the championship on his own.It was team effort; Esprit De Corps! What he inher-
ited from his predecessor was a motley mix of su-
perstars and maverick young guns, and look at howhe turned them into a winning outfit. And that very
fabric is essential to the success of any company.You cant run a company on your own, nor can
you run a company only on hard work. You need tal-ent, flair, diversity, and sustainability. You just need
to find the right mix. No movie can be complete
without its supporting cast, right? So lets try and as-semble a team, let the jigsaw fall into place, and
there would be nothing else left to explain.
THE VETERAN - The most experienced pro in
your team; he has always strived to achieve so muchfor the company. Your go to man in a crisis . He was
in the company when you were in college. Peoplerespect him for his experience. He is by no means an
individual contributor; rather the fulcrum around
which the team revolves.
THE MAVERICK -When he is in his elements,you know that all-important business deals are inyour kitty. He might lose his focus at times and it is
up to you to get him to concentrate on the matter athand. His sheer unpredictability makes him an asset
Cable & Wireless Worldwide PLC (LSE: CW) is a multinational telecommunications company, headBracknell, United Kingdom. It specializes in providing communication services to large corporates, govern
customers, and resellers. Its services include managed voice, data, and IP based services and applications a
Asia Pacific, India, Middle East & Africa, Continental Europe, and North America. Established i
Cable&Wireless Worldwide helps more than 6,000 organizations deliver their goals.
EnJOy yOuR CRICkEt andManagE yOuR tEaMsuCCEssfully tOO!By Shali Thilakan,Managing Director India and South Asia, Cable&Wireless Worldwide
Shali Thilakan
Rear View
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silicon i n dsilicon i n d i a |32|M a r c h 2 0 1 2
(growing business) or the bottom-line(improving efficiencies), the enterprises
typically want those insights faster. Thisis where near-realtime-analytics comes
into the picture. Being able to analyzebillions of financial transactions in a day
and point out fraudulent ones is a case of
batch-oriented analytics. To be able to dothis before approving a transaction, is
real-time analytics. Being able to predicta fraudulent transaction looking at
emerging patterns is an example of near-realtime-analytics. Each of these classes
of analytics needs very different technol-ogy solutions.
Below are some of the getting started
myths in the Big Data Analytics space:
1. Virtualization has no place here:
Virtualized environments along with theright tools to keep focus on developing
business logic, help in getting startedwith Big Data Analytics.
2. I need a 100-node cluster to do
anything meaningful: 10-node clustercan be used to process 250 billion records
of auto-support data. Most enterprisesdont need anything more than a 30-node
cluster and a few need a 100-node cluster.Trying to emulate a 6000-node cluster, as
touted by Internet companies is overkill
for most enterprises.
3. Commodity is cheap: Using com-
modity components such as DAS (directattached storage) is not always cheap. It
is important to look at more practicalmetrics, like the usable storage capacity,
the total cost of ownership and manage-
ment simplicity to reduce operator inter-ventions. Enterprises should develop
their own cost models to determine thedegree of impact of these aspects in their
solutions.
4. Store all the data: Some organiza-
tions will still store all of it, for compli-ance or other reasons. But, most
organizations would want to be given the
option of knowing what to delete. Thus,being able to provide the insight into
what data might be more important thanthe other will become critical for an or-
ganization.
5. I still need to know the question:
Machine-learning techniques are a veryinteresting form of mechanisms that are
emerging so that the patterns presentthemselves rather than a human having
to manually arrange data along differentdimensions and experiment with the data
to find the interesting ones. Clustering
and classification algorithms help ineliminating noise and arranging data in a
manner such that the insights present- it-self. These are some of the advanced an-
alytics techniques that data scientists willspecialize in. However, this is not
panacea, and drill-down interactive ana-lytics will not go away.
I still consider most Big Data solu-
tions in the market as an extension of theexperiment conducted by some Inter-
net companies, in the open source. Thatexperimental infrastructure does not ex-
tend itself naturally into enterprises and Istill do not see any of the Hadoop distri-
butions or solutions providing an Enter-
prise-grade Hadoop. There are still a lotof inefficiencies:
Resource utilizations are very low,and highly imbalanced in a Hadoop
cluster The total cost of ownership is high
The tenets of cluster expansion only
tend to further worsen the resource uti-lization in Hadoop clusters
Prevention against comes with probabilities
it, rather than a 100 perc Faults are not containe
and thus result in lowereetc.
Data unrolling as a
viding HA is highly inescale
All these aspects malow-grade batch-oriente
not for a production envstringent SLAs. Further,
way to leverage emerginlike flash in this space, t
spots. There is no way I c
effective and automatedthese solutions.
Big Data is just abouthe infrastructures and s
Data Analytics are still aam keenly watching MRv
sion of Map-Reduce) in
would help expand the Hadoop into different in
having their own compuI am also keenly watching
ect of Hadoop evolve andbecome the metadata re
enterprise, also helping b
ent data center technologpect Hadoop Mahout to
iterative paradigms wouwith MRv2 and adva
would get that huge impeFinally, I expect near-re
to become mainstream
tional models supportingdrill-down analysis to be
place.A couple of indirect
that Big Data Content highly optimized $/GB
high resiliency charaemerge. Replication as a
data resiliency in Big Da
tions will diminish. Finafootprints will emerge a
trol point going forwardtime analytics solu
batch-analytics will movprovided through a SaaS
Gaurav Makkar, Technical Director (Office of CTO), NetApp
Rear View
While the overalldomestic IT spending isexpected to grow at aCAGR of 12 percent toreach $36 billion by 2015,SMBs at the same timewill grow at a CAGR of 15
percent contributing $15billion by 2015.
Courtesy: Zinnov
Last few years have been an era of nebulous buzz-words in our industry thathave caught on like wild-fire. First it was SaaS, then Cloud and now Big
Data, and not that the first two have gone away. It is also interesting to seehow the latest kid-on-the-block (Big Data) plays in the context of the former ones. But
first, lets set some context.Big Data covers a number of different dimensions and means different things to dif-
ferent organizations. Big Data has been defined as something which is as simple as
ABC. The Big Data space has been segmented into Big Data Analytics, B