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PUBLISHED SINCE 1997sil iconindiaIn My Opinion: Naveen Jain, Intelius 10 MOST PROMISING TECH COMPANIES: Leadforce1, Serus TRIBUTE: CK Prahalad

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MAY - 2010

Editorial

[Technology]What is Social Media Insecurity?By Gary Bahadur, KRAA Security

Software for Software Development Life CycleBy Mahesh S. Prabhu, ITC Infotech

Games for Good are GoodBusiness TooBy Kunal Sarkar, LumosLabs

Agile Offshore Oxymoron?By V. Kannan, SRA Systems

[CIO Profile]Cloud & Mobile ComputingThe NEXT FRONTIERBy Vimali Swamy

[SI 20 Profile]

[In My Opinion]Top 10 Lessons for an EntrepreneurBy Naveen Jain, Intelius

[Infocus]

[VC Chakra]Tessolve Services Secures $5Million in Series C FundingPubMatic Raises $7.5 Millionin Series C Funding

[VC Talk]Mobile Computing A NewTurn-on for VC EyesBy Amit Sudarshan, Illinois Ventures

[Technology]Enterprise Information SystemsBy Dr Subodh Kesharwani, IGNOU

[Business]Planning is the Best Way toGetting AheadBy Karthik Padmanabhan, IBMLotus Software

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Contents May2010

16

MOST PROMISING TECH COMPANIES

10

A Tribute toC K Prahalad

LeadForce1 The Next Google ofthe B2B sector?By Vimali Swamy

Serus Managing OutsourcedOperations IntelligentlyBy Vimali Swamy

By Christo Jacob

Winston Churchill once said “Without tradition, art is aflock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovationit is a corpse.” This is the same in the case of technol-

ogy companies. Without innovation happening in their backyards,it will be a corpse, or rather it will become a follower and not bea leader. It is easy to blame the chief executives and senior man-agement for not devoting enough attention to introducing newproducts, but that is too simplistic an explanation for why radi-cally new products are so rare. To achieve this, today most exec-utives are constrained not by resources but by their imagination.Successful strategic innovations need more than a great idea. Agreat idea should not be just a cash cow, but an idea that can ad-dress the needs of the poor, as well as the potential that lower in-come markets hold for firms. As CK Prahlad said, “Theentrepreneurs should be aiming at the bottom of Pyramid that cantransform the lives of People.”

It is a known fact that 70 percent of the world’s growth over thenext few years will come from emerging markets, 40 percent ofwhich will be from India and China. And the mother and midwifeof these innovations will be the pressing problems of the devel-oping world - healthcare, education, water, energy, food, commu-nications, housing and corruption. To address these, I feel Indianscan play a great lead in making this grant vision come true.We In-dians already add to our credit of having founded close to 10,000startups in the valley which accounts to 40 percent of high-tech-nology start-ups in US. And now we look forward to see more andmore innovations from Indians.

In this issue, we present ten most promising tech companieswho have created a dent in different sphere. It was not a popular-ity contest, so no voting was allowed; it was an effort by our edi-torial staff with the help of several VCs, corporate executives, andexperienced entrepreneurs to showcase 10 private technologycompanies in the U.S., which we think are most likely to be thegame changers.

Please do share your thoughts with us.Christo JacobManaging [email protected]

Innovation: Only Game Changer

Cover Story

TAVANTTeamwork

Redefining

Sarvesh Mahesh

I’ve been an entrepreneur most of myadult life. Recently, on a long businessflight, I began thinking about what ittakes to become successful as an en-trepreneur and how I would even de-

fine the meaning of ‘success’ itself. The twoideas became more intertwined in my think-ing: success as an entrepreneur and entrepre-neurial success. I’ve given a lot of talks overthe years on the subject of entrepreneurship.The first thing I find I have to do is to dispelthe persistent myth that entrepreneurial suc-cess is all about innovative thinking andbreakthrough ideas. I’ve found that entrepre-neurial success usually comes through greatexecution, simply by doing a superior job ofdoing the blocking and tackling.

But what else does it take to succeed asan entrepreneur and how should an entrepre-neur define success?

Bored with the long flight, sinkingdeeper into my own thoughts, I wrote downmy own answers to send to my kids. Here’swhat I came up with:

The ‘Top Ten List’ for a budding entre-preneur10. You must be ‘passionate’ about whatyou are trying to achieve. That means you’rewilling to sacrifice a large part of your wak-ing hours for the idea you’ve come up with.This passion will ignite the same intensity inthe others who join you as you build a teamto succeed in this endeavor. And with pas-

sion, both your team and your customers aremore likely to truly believe in what you aretrying to do.

9. Great entrepreneurs ‘focus’ intensely onan opportunity where others see nothing.This focus and intensity helps eliminatewasted effort and distractions. Most compa-nies die from indigestion rather than starva-tion, i.e. companies suffer from doing toomany things at the same time rather thandoing a few things very well. Stay focusedon the mission.

8. Success only comes from ‘hard work’.We all know that there is no such thing asovernight success. Behind every overnightsuccess lies years of hard work and sweat.People with luck will tell you that there’s noeasy way to achieve success - and that luckcomes to those who work hard. Successfulentrepreneurs always give 100 percent oftheir efforts to everything they do. If youknow you are giving your best effort, you’llnever have any reason for regrets. Focus onthings you can control; stay focused on yourefforts and let the results be what they willbe.

7. The road to success is going to be long, soremember to ‘enjoy the journey’. Everyonewill teach you to focus on goals, but suc-cessful people focus on the journey and cel-ebrate the milestones along the way. Is it

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worth spending a large part of your lifetrying to reach the destination if you did-n’t enjoy the journey along the way?Won’t the team you attract to join you onyour mission also enjoy the journey moreas well? Wouldn’t it be better for all ofyou to enjoy the time of your life duringthe journey, even if the destination isnever reached?

6. Trust your ‘gut instinct’ more thanany spreadsheet. There are too manyvariables in the real world that you sim-ply can’t put into a spreadsheet. Spread-sheets spit out results from your inexactassumptions and give you a false senseof security. In most cases, your heart andgut are still your best guide. The humanbrain works as a binary computer andcan only analyze the exact information-based zeros and ones (or black andwhite). Our heart is more like a chemicalcomputer that uses fuzzy logic to analyzeinformation that can’t be easily definedin zeros and ones. We’ve all had experi-ences in business where our heart told ussomething was wrong while our brainwas still trying to use logic to figure it allout. Sometimes a faint voice of instinctresonates far more strongly than over-powering logic.

5. Be flexible but persistent – Every en-trepreneur has to be agile in order to per-form. You have to continually learn andadapt as new information becomes avail-able. At the same time you have to re-main persistent to the cause and missionof your enterprise. That’s where that faintvoice becomes so important, especiallywhen it is giving you early warning sig-nals that things are going off-track. Suc-cessful entrepreneurs find the balancebetween listening to that voice and stay-ing persistent in driving for success - be-cause sometimes success is waiting rightacross from the transitional bump that’sdisguised as failure.

4. Rely on your team – It’s a simple factthat no individual can be good at every-thing. Everyone needs people around

them who have complimentary sets ofskills. Entrepreneurs are an optimisticbunch of people and it’s very hard forthem to believe that they are not good atcertain things. It takes a lot of soul-searching to find your own core skillsand strengths. After that, find the smartestpeople you can, who compliment yourstrengths. It’s easy to get attracted to peo-ple who are like you; the trick is to findpeople who are not like you but who aregood at what they do and what you can’tdo.

3. Execution, execution, execution –Unless you are the smartest person onearth (and who is) it’s likely that manyothers have thought about doing thesame thing you’re trying to do. Successdoesn’t necessarily come from break-through innovation but from flawless‘execution’. A great strategy alone won’twin a game or a battle; the win comesfrom basic blocking and tackling. All ofus have seen entrepreneurs who wastetoo much time writing business plans andpreparing power points. I believe that abusiness plan is too long if it’s more thanone page. Besides, things never turn outexactly the way you envisioned them. Nomatter how much time you spend per-fecting the plan, you still have to adaptaccording to the ground realities. You’regoing to learn a lot more useful informa-tion from taking action rather than hy-pothesizing. Remember this - stayflexible and adapt as new informationbecomes available.

2. I can’t imagine anyone ever achievinglong term success without having ‘hon-esty and integrity’. These two qualitiesneed to be at the core of everything wedo. Everybody has a conscience - but toomany people stop listening to it. There is

always that faint voice that warns youwhen you are not being completely hon-est or even slightly off track from thepath of integrity. Be sure to listen to thatvoice.

1. Success is a long journey and muchmore rewarding if you ‘give back’. Bythe time you get to success, lots of peo-ple will have helped you along the way.You’ll learn, as I have, that you rarely geta chance to help the people who helpedyou because in most cases, you don’teven know who they were. The only wayto pay back the debts we owe is to helppeople we can help - and hope they willgo on to help more people. We draw somuch from the community and societythat we live in that when we are success-ful we should think in terms of how wecan help others in return. Sometimes it’sjust a matter of being kind to people. Atother times, offering a sympathetic ear ora kind word is all that’s needed. It’s ourresponsibility to do ‘good’ with the re-sources we have at our disposal.

Measuring SuccessHopefully, you have internalized the se-crets of becoming a successful entrepre-neur. The next question you are likely toask yourself is: How do we measure suc-cess? Success, of course, is very per-sonal; there is no universal way ofmeasuring success. What do successfulpeople like Bill Gates and Mother Teresahave in common? On the surface it’shard to find anything they share - and yetboth are successful. I personally believethe real metric of success isn’t the size ofyour bank account. It’s the number oflives where you might be able to make apositive difference. This is the measureof success we need to apply while we areon our journey to success. si

Lessons for anEntrepreneur

Top 10FFooccuuss oonn tthhiinnggss you can control;stay focused on your efforts and let

the results be what they will be >>

<<

Naveen Jain

GURU TALK By Naveen JainThe author is Founder and CEO, Intelius


in

India should develop an indige-nous model for development thatfocuses on low-cost solutions, in-

stead of copying the consumption-based American economic model,which is unsuitable for the country.While delivering a lecture on ‘Impactof Information Technology on Indiansociety’ at Tech ED 2010, the advisorto Prime Minister, Sam Pitroda,called for innovative ideas for devel-opment from the country’s IT profes-sionals with emphasis on affordabletechnologies rather than blindly fol-lowing the consumption-based USdevelopment model that is incompat-ible with our country.

“It is high time for the country to

concentra teon develop-ing an indige-nous modelfor develop-ment by giv-ing ampleimportance tolow-cost so-lutions thatare locallyr e l e v a n t , ”

Pitroda says.Information and Communication

Technology (ICT) has already per-vaded everywhere in India. But whatwe need is technologies that are costeffective, have local content, and use

local language. The country’s admin-istration has immensely benefitedfrom the developments in the IT in-dustry. Now, the task is to make it ac-cessible to gram panchayats (villageadministrations).

This technology has to be taken tothe village-level by connecting 2.5lakh (0.25 million) village adminis-trations, which form the core of thelocal government and vital in thepresent setup through broadband. Thetechnologists can use eight lakh km(0.8 million km) of fiber optic linesthat are already in existence. Indianeeds to formulate groundbreakingdevelopment models in sectors suchas education and health. si

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Sam Pitroda

What thrills a Bangalore-based Microsoft techieRamaprasad is letting

smart robots do all the humdrumwork at home. He has built robotsthat can cook, keep the house safewhen he is away, and help him spendhis leisure the way he likes the best.Also, these robots pitch him the newsof his interests and show him the adsof products he would like to buy.

Ramaprasad calls these robots asBuddyhomes. The software, hard-ware, design, and implementation areall his, reports a daily. For the past 15days, Buddyhomes do every work for

Ramaprasad. They wake him up withan alarm. If he does not wake up, theypour water over his head. He goes forhis breakfast, puts the noodles into apan on the stove, then leaves becausehe wants to read the newspaper. In themeanwhile, the Buddyhome stirs thenoodles and in two minutes Ram-prasad gets a message that noodles isready. He scans the newspapers. Headmires Lalu Prasad Yadav and readswhatever news is there about him; hesmiles, and immediately, the screenon the wall before him shows the lat-est available news about Lalu.

Building these robots with soft-ware including cloud computing, Mi-crosoft.Net, Visual Studio 2010, andOpen Computer Vision, Ramaprasadsays that the technology to build therobots is ‘very simple’. It has threewebcams and a screen, gesture-rec-

ognizing software, and hardwarebought from SP Road near TownHall. “It costs me just Rs. 16,000. It isso inexpensive because most parts arefrom SP Road. The motors, chips, at-mega, and H bridges are all from SPRoad.”

Now Ramaprasad is trying tofine-tune the robots to do wet mopsof the floor, and do more sophisti-cated cooking. In particular, he wantsto pursue developing gesture-readingrobots because he sees great potentialin it for the hearing and speech-im-paired. “I think it is possible to inter-pret gestures and turn them intovoice. Just think how it can help thosewho cannot speak,” says Ramaprasadwho studied in College of Engineer-ing, Guindy, Chennai, and holds a BEdegree in computer science and engi-neering from Anna University.

Barron's, a U.S. financial maga-zine, has come up with its sev-enth annual list of America's

top 100 financial advisors. Brian Pfei-fler of Morgan Stanley Smith Barneytopped the list, whereas Indian originadvisors Sanjan Dhody, Managing Di-rector and Client Advisor of AlexBrown and Raj Sharma Senior VicePresident, Private Banking and Invest-ments Group, Merrill Lynch securedthe 24th and 62nd positions respec-tively.

The magazine has given the rank-ing based on assets under manage-ment, quality of the advisors' practices,and revenue the advisors generate fortheir firm. Investment performance isnot an explicit criterion, because many

advisors don't have audited results,and their clients have a wide variety ofinvestment goals, from conservative toaggressive. But to build billion-dollar-plus businesses, as each of the 100 ad-visors has done, generally requires astrong long-term track record.

Dhody joined Deutsche Bank AlexBrown from Lehman Brothers, where,since 2000, he has built a significantHigh Net Worth advisory practicecomplemented by a focus on equity,fixed income and structured solutionsfor sophisticated investors. Prior tojoining Lehman Brothers in 1996 in itsFixed Income Division, Dhody was aResearch Analyst for Citicorp Interna-tional Securities and was based inLondon.

On the other side, Sharma has donehis schooling from St.Pauls High school,Hyderabad and then earned his com-merce degree from Nizam college andan MBA from Osmania University hasbeen with Merrill Lynch for 17 years,serving individual investors, corpora-tions and foundations with comprehen-sive financial planning advice, estate,philanthropic and legacy planning con-sultation, retirement, education planningand asset management services. Asfounder of the Sharma Group withinMerrill Lynch, he runs a team providingprivate wealth management and strate-gic financial planning services for highnet worth individuals and families, aswell as business financial services foremerging companies. si

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Ramaprasad


As per the figure of the IndianCellular Association, 26 mil-lion out of India’s 563 million

mobile phone subscribers have hand-sets that are 3G enabled. Indians whouse 3G handsets outnumber the entirepopulation of Australia by about fivemillion, Belgium by 16 million, Den-mark by 21 million, the Netherlandsby 10 million, and Switzerland by 19million.

The government believes that 3Gservices will be up and running in sixmonths. Currently the country is goingthrough the motions of selecting tele-

com companies that will eventuallyrun the 3G services. 26 million mobileusers already have 3G handsets whileonly 2G services are available in thecountry.

In a report titled ‘Uptake of 3GServices in India’, Evalueserve statesthat the number of Indians with 3Ghandsets will increase to 395 millionby 2013, growing by 82 percentCAGR (compounded annual growthrate). In three years from now, urbanmobile users will account for 80 per-cent of 3G subscribers and use serv-ices such as video downloads, music

downloads, Internet applications, andsearch.

“3G is expected to initially create‘voice’ capacity in the existing spec-trum; it will eventually deliver a bou-quet of services from vanilla voice andbasic data to rich entertainment andmore. We believe that 3G in India willbe driven by content rather thanvoice,” says V Ramnath, Director ofOperator Accounts, Nokia. Even withthe current technologies, there is bigdemand for content in India. Nokia hasover 20 3G handset models. It haslaunched Ovi, an Internet servicesbrand, specifically with 3G in mind.

Deepesh Gupta, Managing Direc-tor, Zen Mobiles, opines that thelaunch of 3G will open the doors to in-novative value-added services, whichwill bring everything on just one con-vergent device, bringing a paradigmshift in cellular communications. “Weplan to come up with 3G handsets inthree months. We see a huge growthand our R&D team is already workingon product development,” he says.

Asurvey conducted on 13 keynations found that the exec-utives in India have the

maximum faith in their CEOs andgeneral corporate leadership. Com-pared to the U.S., Canada, andBritain their counterparts in China,Brazil, and Russia also have muchmore faith. Interestingly, Indian ex-ecutives ranked the credibility oftheir CEOs at 81 and the credibilityof their corporate leadership in gen-eral at 78, the highest among 13countries. The global mean for CEOcredibility was 69 and for corporateleadership in general was 70.

There is a wide distinction in how

executives feel about the courseunder CEOs. On a scale from -100 to+100, executives in India, China,Brazil, and Russia expressedstrongest support for their corporatebosses, posting scores of 52, 53, 44,and 26 respectively against a globalmean of 22.On the other hand, withtheir mean scores of -1, -4, and -5, ex-ecutives in Canada, the U.S., andBritain showed their lack of confi-dence in their corporate bosses.

The confidence in CEOs and cor-porate leadership globally increasedduring the past year, hinting that eco-nomic recovery is under way after theglobal meltdown. The Direction of

Leadership Index rose 3.7 points to26.3 in the first quarter of 2010, indi-cating that confidence in CEOs glob-ally is back after the economicmeltdown.

The survey, ‘Confidence in Lead-ership Index’, was done by the LosAngeles-based Korn/Ferry Interna-tional, a global provider of talentmanagement solutions. Ana Dutra,CEO, Korn/Ferry Leadership and Tal-ent Consulting, says ,”Leaders at thetop of the house set the tone for theirorganizations, and steadily increasingsupport indicates that CEOs’ actionsare instilling confidence in their em-ployees, peers, and directors. si

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Tessolve Services, an independ-ent full-service semiconductortest and product engineering

company, has raised $5 million in theseries C round, bringing the total fund-ing to $15 million. The round led byReliance Venture Asset Managementalong with the participation of JAFCOAsia, Qualcomm Ventures, and AppliedVentures, would help the company inaccelerating organic and strategic inor-ganic growth to boost operations andexpand capabilities in India.

P. Raja Manickam, Founder, Tes-solve Services says, “In the Indian mar-ket, where semiconductor is still in anascent phase with an annual growth of15-20 percent, Tessolve helps semi-conductor product companies to in-crease the number of new products to

maintain or grow with the support of itsscalability, cost, and engineering ex-pertise.

Founded in 2004 with a focus ondeveloping software applications thatanalyze chip designs and drive the mis-sion critical equipment use to test semi-conductor products, the companyassists product firms to develop test so-lutions for RF, advanced mixed-signal,memory, and digital devices. Having ateam of professionals with experiencein the test, test hardware development,package assembly, DFT & FA, Tes-solve offers professional, state-of-the-art, and efficient solutions.

Based out of Bangalore and havingoffices in the U.S. and Singapore, thesemiconductor test engineering firmprovides customers access to industry

leading high end, mixed-signal testingsystems and related services. Also, itprovides experienced engineering ca-pability to support and manage allfunctions from DFT through assemblyand test in the semicon life cycle.

Recently, the company signed anagreement with Dynamic Test Solu-tions to create one of the industry’slargest and most integrated test servicessuppliers. The combined infrastructureand resources will allow the companyto provide a comprehensive and inte-grated approach to outsourced test so-lutions for semiconductor companiesfor the entire life cycle of their products from the first silicon functional test, tooptimized production release, and intopost-production services.

Having an employee strength ofaround 400, the company plans todominate post-silicon activities andbe listed on the Indian stock ex-changes (BSE and NSE) in threeyears down the line.

PubMatic, a Palo Alto based onlinead optimization service company,has bagged $7.5 million in series C

funding, which was led by Helion VenturePartners. The company also gets the sup-port of the existing ventures Draper FisherJurvetson and Nexus Venture Partners.This round of investment brings Pub-Matic’s total funding to $18 million. With this new round of funding, the com-pany plans to accelerate the adoption of itsrecently announced set of new offerings,which includes an impression-level adauction with realtime bidding, global de-mand representation, audience analyticsand monetization, enhanced brand controland data safety, guaranteed inventory yieldmanagement, and enterprise ad operationssupport. With the help of these new appli-cations, sales and ad operations teams canmanage all ad revenue from a single dash-board and gain new insights into inventoryand pricing across non-guaranteed and

guaranteed inventory channels. Also, thiswill help publishers to find new ways ofselling existing inventory and improve thevalue of the inventory sold by their directsales force. Currently the company hasaround 6,000 publishers in its network.Rajeev Goel, Co-founder and CEO ofPubMatic says, “Till now, no other com-pany has come to market with so manytools to make certain premium publishersearn the most revenue while ensuring con-trol over their brand, and this has allowedus to grow revenue by over 700 percentsince a year ago. This new injection ofcapital will accelerate the pace of adoptionand development of revenue maximizing

and brand control tools for publishers.”Co-founded in 2006 by Amar Goel

with Rajeev Goel and Mukul Kumar,PubMatic’s management technologycombines an impression-level ad auc-tion to give the Web’s top publishers thebest possible control over their revenueand brand. Some of the online publish-ers that work with PubMatic are IAC,The Huffington Post, eBay, United On-line, and TV Guide. This privately heldcompany, which is recognized as the‘sell side platform’ for premium pub-lishers, has seven offices around theworld spread across the U.S, Europe,and Asia and has about 50 employees.

$ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $

PubMatic Raises $7.5 Million in Series

C Funding

Tessolve Services Secures $5 Million in Series C Funding

Raja Manickam

Rajeev Goel

Gartner predicts cloudcomputing and activemonitoring of securityto be among the topten trends. These tech-

nology trends will drive the growthof IT services, and the IT servicestrend in turn will shift from the tra-ditional IT enabled customer supportservices to services thatwould include technol-ogy services to theclients.

Cloud based serv-ices help in optimizingthe resources requiredand to scale up easily. Itoffers a low manage-ment overhead, lowbarrier to entry, and im-mediate access to abroad range of applica-tions. The key featureof cloud computing isservice. Cloud comput-ing emerged during theeconomic downturn byreducing the need to in-vest in digital infra-structure, as it allowsan entrepreneur toavoid capital expendi-ture on hardware, software, and serv-ices, while allowing paying theprovider only for the use.

Although cloud computing hasnot fully penetrated all segments ofenterprises, this seems to be the fu-ture around which a lot more inno-vative solutions will emerge, giventhe obvious benefits. Functional ap-plications, such as human resource

management, are fit candidates forcloud based services, as in a regionthe regulatory requirements are com-mon and with little customization theapplication can cater to a wide rangeof industries. Based on per-em-ployee charges, the model will be at-tractive to a large number ofindustries. Initially a lot of such sup-

port function applica-tions will quicklyemerge as services, be-fore others such asmanufacturing-specificapplications go on thecloud.

The current eco-nomic climate is notvery encouraging forentrepreneurs as bothbusiness ideas andfunding are hard tocome by. It is importantto secure the necessaryfunding before embark-ing on a venture and si-multaneously plan onreaching sustainabilityearly on. The ongoingrecession can lead tosome fundamentalchanges in the environ-

ment and the legacy concepts maynot work in the future. It is importantto identify the potential new trendsand focus on them. One should beprepared to take advantage of thatwhen the economy picks up. This isthe time to work on that new idea astalent is easily available and the en-trepreneur may be just in time for themarket on its upswing. si

Today’s ICs include one ormore processors, memory,and various digital siliconintellectual property (IP)blocks, plus

analog IP such as sensors,interfaces, and antennas.To implement thesemixed-signal systems onchip (SoCs), designers re-quire fast, accurate, andhigh capacity analog anddigital design tools thatcan be tightly integratedinto a single design envi-ronment. This need hasled EDA providers to cre-ate solutions with the em-bedded digital designsystem.

The designs also re-quire better static timinganalysis because the num-ber of process, voltage,and temperature (PVT)corners has increased dra-matically and there aremany more scenarios thatmust be analyzed. To address this withconventional tools, the designers re-quire more static timing analysis li-censes, more expensive machines, andmore time. The new design platformsallow designers to fully analyze anydesign in about an hour, which savestime and makes it possible to analyzeat a limited cost. Hence, designers donot have to cut corners by choosing toanalyze only a limited number of PVTcorners.

As always, the changing require-ments of the semiconductor design en-

gineer will shape the EDA industry.The EDA industry must develop toolsthat enable engineers to design moreadvanced and complex ICs in less

time, with smaller teams,and fewer computing re-sources. The introductionof new design method-ologies, innovative tools,and the growing demandfor ICs for the markets inIndia and China will helpdrive the growth of theEDA industry.

Inventing a greatproduct is probably theleast of the EDA entre-

preneur’s challenges.Right now, there’s very lit-tle venture capital fundingavailable in the EDA seg-ment, or even the semi-conductor space as awhole. To get funding fora startup, entrepreneursneed a great product, asolid business plan, and astrong, high-demand mar-

ket. The good news is that the EDA in-

dustry provides critical technology thatthe over $200 billion semiconductorindustry relies on. There’s always anew problem that EDA can solve forthe design engineers. Now could bethe perfect time to start a company.Don’t get dazzled by your technologyand make sure that you and your teamhave solid business sense. And, workclosely with customers to understandtheir requirements and how you canmeet them.


are into a completesystem level design-ing, or the ones whobuild smaller solu-tions to fit into thelarger landscape, cannow use licenses on-demand according totheir needs, while en-suring a securedcloud computingusage. The new trend

at different levels willhelp in reducing veri-fication time, whichwill allow parameter-izing designs and as aresult it will check thetendency to over-de-sign based on intuitiveverification. Thus, thesame results in a bet-ter product with re-duced time-to-market.

The entrepreneursmust note the oppor-

tunities that lie in the system designspace; they should also, however, beon their toes to provide a convinc-ing business proposal. This wouldhelp the enterprises to try out newsolutions, overcoming the qualmsassociated with signing a deal witha new company that is yet to proveits viability. In fact, with the com-petition getting tough, it’s advisablefor the budding entrepreneurs tofocus on an existing solution and in-novate on it to bring value, thoughthis doesn’t imply a mere low costsolution, rather a solution with itsunique IP.

The system design indus-try is witnessing turn-arounds at differentlevels. At the processmanufacturing level is

the concept of ‘through silicon via’(TSV), a process which implies avertical electrical connection thatcompletely passes through siliconwafer. The TSV technology gainsground with the growing impor-tance of creating 3D packages and3D integrated circuits. In fact, inthe next two years 20 percent of thedesigns will incorporate TSV. Thetrend will help pack more featuresinto the chip at a lower cost, whichwill demand electro-magnetic ef-fects, and in turn boost the magni-tude of 3D deliberately outwitting2D effects.

The increasing utility of 3D andwireless enabled devices is impact-ing the application level and corpo-rates are turning around for higherbandwidth. The bandwidth power isrecognized across the sectors andnot necessarily limited to the wire-less and the video applications; it iswitnessed in the diverse fields in-cluding air force. For instance, interms of the broadcasts within anairplane, where signal clarity is ofutmost importance, higher band-width becomes a necessity.

With the new technological ad-vancements in the different systemdesign process companies are onthe lookout for better computingplatforms. Computing that nowdrives sale and demand or comput-ing in the cloud. Large players who

CEOSPOTLIGHT

Rajeev Madhavan isthe Chairman andCEO of Magma

Design Automation.Founded in 1997,Magma is an EDA

software provider builton the concept of

combining logic andphysical designs into a

single system.

EDA Needs More InclusiveAnalysis @ Lower Cost

Chip Packed with More Featuresat Low Cost Marks the New Trend

Cloud Computing – TheMedium for IT Momentum

Bala Vishwanath isthe President & CEOof Physware. He alongwith Vikram Jand-hyala and DipanjanGope brings theknowledge to providehigh-speed innovative3D fullwave solutionsthat enable broadbandverification and designacross the chip - pack-age - board ecosystems.

Chandra SekharBilugu is the CEO ofeGestalt. eGestalt pro-vides automation andon demand delivery ofintegrated IT Securityand compliance man-agement, through Se-cureGRC products andservices.

TAVANTTeamwork

By Christo Jacob

Redefining

When the top notchfinancial servicescompanies includ-ing MB Trading,optionMONSTER,

Fifth Third Bank and others opentheir wallets in search of best-of-breed technology solutions, theyknock the doors of Tavant Technolo-gies. The Santa Clara, CA, based Ta-vant helps the biggies to decreaselatency and increase speed, upgradetechnology platforms, build manage-ment solutions, and to set themselvesup at co-location facilities. As weknow, the race to have the best tech-nology that will slice latency down tomicroseconds - and eventually tonanoseconds - is far from over. So inthe big IT services market whereeven the biggies are now focused onthe BFSI sector, what gives Tavantthe edge and advantage?

“Customers are not just ourclients, they are like partners andthey need to know as much as we do,” says Sarvesh Mahesh, CEO, Ta-vant Technologies. Mahesh wasquick to carve a niche and break the

conventional mode. He follows thesimple mantra of ‘transparency’, and‘access to realtime status of eachproject’ and beleives that it has re-ally worked among the customers.

Now, the company is in a mo-mentum of growth as the mantra thatworked well to woo the top notch on-line financial clients has in turnhelped them get more players. Ta-vant’s legacy of having transparencyamong the employees and its uniqueglobal client engagement helped Ta-vant to make sure that the customersget focused attention on minimizingissues and maximizing customer sat-isfaction. Unlike its competitors, thecompany believes in building andstrengthening relationships with itscustomers and delivering the deepunderstanding of domain expertise.As the financial services market con-tinues to evolve every day, the cus-tomers in this space are constantlydemanding improved services andbetter experiences on their web-basedapplications. So at the same time re-ducing overhead remains a criticalchallenge to stay competitive.

Customers arenot just our

clients, they arelike partnersand they needto know as

much as we do

Sarvesh Mahesh

COVER STORY


Currently, the financial services in-dustry is undergoing a significanttransformation in how applications aredesigned and delivered. A key drivingforce behind this shift is the growingimperative to be global both in termsof providing customer-facing servicesand in taking advantage of a distrib-uted global workforce. Applicationsthat were previously deployed locallyon well-provisioned workstations orkiosks need to be redesigned to servean increasingly distributed globalclient base running ‘thinner clients’such as consumer PCs, laptops, note-books, and mobile phones. Maheshwas quick enough to grab the opportu-nity.

“For Tavant, e-business is ourblood, and that’s where we started,”says Mahesh. Having had stints at Jun-glee and Amazon.com, Mahesh’s ex-pertise in Web technologies has helpedTavant have an advantage in develop-ment of Web technology based e-busi-ness applications. This includes userexperience design, leveraging the lat-est Web 2.0 technologies and the useof emerging open source Web tech-nologies. Over the last year, Tavanthas also developed expertise in build-ing applications for mobile devices.“Some of our biggest projects in thesecurities and trading domain, aredone on open source components, andare the first of their kind in the world.Such high availability, concurrencyand transaction rate Web-based appli-cations based on open source hadnever been done before,” he says. Tocreate such a history of first-of-its-kind was possible only due to itsstrength in e-business. The combina-tion of domain expertise, technologyexcellence, executive commitment,and transparency also gives addedmileage. “Tavant’s expertise and plat-form allows us to better compete in theonline channel and offer our customersa positive application experience,“says Marilyn Mocilnikar, SVP at FifthThird Bank.

The EdgeOnline brokers have a huge demandfor online tools that streamline theselling process in a personalized Web2.0 environment. Those solutionscombine simplicity of data access withcustomizable user interfaces, provid-ing on-demand views and multi-ac-count snapshots with dynamicinformation aggregation and analysis.With such solutions, agents and chan-nel partners have the tools to quicklyand easily analyze account positionsand focus on growing revenues. Thisdrives productivity and improves theretention of valuable independentagents. Tavant has created an edge inthis arena. Tavant brings in game-changing services, solutions, and com-ponents to the trading industry usingthe latest in SOA, Web 2.0, Rich In-ternet Applications (RIAs), and real-time streaming technologies.

Most online brokers’ key objectiveis to continue to be a low-cost providerin all major asset classes and offersolid customer support and softwaresolutions for everyone from beginnersto advanced traders. In fact the Cali-fornia-based provider was able to un-derstand the pain points of thebusiness. Having domain expertise ofover three years in the trading and se-curities value chain, Tavant offers so-lutions that combine leading edgetechnology with business insights to

power the next generation and scala-ble operations that allow online bro-kers to offer new levels of customerexperience, while minimizing thecosts. It has a legacy of transformingbanks, brokerages, and financial firmsto become Web 2.0-enabled, developadvanced equity options, futures,bonds, and mutual fund trading sys-tems; deploy real-time, interactive,trader friendly rich Internet applica-tions, implement algorithmic tradingstrategies and portfolio decisioningsystems using complex event process-ing engines, and provide value addedservices on top of direct marketing ac-cess channels. This was possible onlywith Tavant’s advantage in develop-ment of Rich Internet Applications forzero footprints and zero maintenancetrading applications using Flex, Sil-verlight, and AJAX with expertise inkey enabling technologies for trading:complex event processing systems andreverse server push technologies.

Even though Tavant is wellequipped with domain expertise, Ma-hesh does not want to miss any flawsthat make the customer feel unsatis-fied. The company does not believe inthe heritage of not doing for eachother, but doing together and givingimportance to have complete opencommunication. To ensure such anecosystem, the company has created amulti-level engagement model - engi-neer to engineer, project manager to

project manager, engagement managerto engagement manager, and finallyexecutive sponsor to customer’s exec-utive sponsor.

So Tavant has created a projectmanagement portal - an online dash-board wherein the customer can get re-altime status of each project.Moreover, the company has leveragedthe best shore model in which itsworkforce, especially senior leads andexperts close to the customer side,come in. Moreover, based on the clientand project requirements the companyhas its workforce based in Noida andBangalore. “Over the years we haverealized that this model really workswell,” says Vibhor Mishra, Head ofMarketing Department at Tavant.There are weekly calls with the engi-neering teams, monthly calls with ac-count managers, and quarterlymeetings with the executive sponsorsthat help them optimize the findings inthe meetings and share them with thestakeholders. Access to realtime statusis well appreciated by Tavant’s cus-tomers. Moreover, the participation ofexecutive management in every levelof the project helps customers gainconfidence in Tavant.

Making a DifferenceThe famous Harvard business profes-sor Nicholas G Carr once said, “IT isnot going to be a differentiator.”While IT services market being acrowded one with over 1,000 compa-nies delivering array of services fo-cusing on BFSI, manufacturing, andmore, it’s hard to make a differenceand pool in the customers. But Maheshknows how to play the cards right. Hebreaks the conventional mode of whatmost big players think. Mahesh hascarved a niche for Tavant Technolo-gies wherein they focus on providingsolutions for micro verticals – tradingand securities, e-business, consumerlending, and service operations. Sinceits inception e-business has been Ta-vant’s strongest revenue source.

In fact Tavant’s outsourced Webapplication and technology expertisehas helped its customers acceleratefeatures and functionality to the mar-ket and lower the IT cost. Its productsand services are routinely rated highby the industry and media and de-ployed by leading business names, likeElectronic Arts, TiVo, Major LeagueBaseball Advanced Media, New YorkTimes, Ingersoll Rand, Bobcat, Fed-eral Signal, Wolters Kluwer FinancialServices, and many more.

For instance, one of its customers,Electronic Arts (EA), a leading inde-pendent developer and publisher of in-teractive entertainment software foradvanced entertainment systems,wanted a revolutionary way forgamers where they could extendgames online and share and interactwith other gamers. They needed gamecreation tools and a Web portal tomake game creation simple and shar-ing easier and accessible. One of thebiggest challenges was to create an on-line portal platform for creating, dis-covering, playing, and sharing ‘usercreated’ casual games and micro andmini games for one of the divisions ofEA, rapidly develop a robust and scal-able solution in the set time frame andhelp reduce the time-to-market. Tavantprovided core functionality of the newgaming portal using latest AJAX andFlex technologies.

Having used this expertise acrossmany industries and e-business con-texts, Electronic Arts has now ex-tended these core capabilitiessuccessfully to the gaming industryusing Tavant. They retained TavantTechnologies to provide offshore en-abled services in an agile, onshore-off-shore development approach.

TheSimsCarnival.com is an onlinecommunity and gaming experiencefrom The Sims that makes game cre-ation and sharing more accessible. TheSims’ design is intended to convertmillions of players into game design-ers, with no programming skills re-quired. “TheSimsCarnival.com projectallowed Tavant to showcase two of itscore differentiating capabilities: use ofWeb technology in complex applica-tion environments and rapid and agilesolution development with an on-

shore-offshore approach,” says Ma-hesh. For most of the playerstime-to-market is a key factor and infact delivering Electronic Arts a newonline gaming experience to market ina short time frame has leveraged Ta-vant’s offshore development expertise.

“Our team developed the Web por-tal and helped Electronic Arts designthe overall solution,” says ManishArya, CTO at Tavant Technologies.“Our expertise in system integrationand open source Web technologies al-lowed us to rapidly develop and de-ploy a robust and scalable solution forthe highly demanding and complexonline gaming environment.”

Warranty ManagementAnother area which Tavant adds up toits portfolio is warranty management.When a company is leaking money atthe rate of about $1 million a day, it’ssurprising that the reason behind itdoes not receive more attention. Forabout a dozen major US manufactur-ers that’s the amount they are spend-ing just honoring their product andservice warranties. For the industry asa whole, the numbers are staggering.In the U.S. alone, the warranty busi-ness accounts for about $2 billion each

Global Engagement Model

Tavant

Strategic Management (Executives, Practice Head, Global Delivery Manager)

O!shore Onshore

Account Level Delivery (Global Delivery Manager)

Account Management (Client Partner & PGM)

Delivery(PM & APM)

Delivery(PGM & Onsite Coordinator)

Customer

Strategic Management (CIO, CEO, CFO…)

Organizational Management (Directors, VPs…)

Delivery Management (Project/Product Manager)

In the U.S. alone, the warranty business accountsfor about $2 billion each month, or just under $24billion annually


month, or just under $24 billionannually. About two percent ofevery sale goes to warrantyspending. It all adds up to a lotof money.

Still, more effective war-ranty management processesare just not on the radar of mostexecutives today. The area ofservice management is often anafterthought, and warranty man-agement as a subset is evenlower: the afterthought of theafterthought. In practice, com-panies often pay attention totheir warranty managementprocesses only when high levelsof liability are involved with aclaim or recall. As a conse-quence, they are missing oppor-tunities for significant bottomline cost savings, as well as in-creased business value throughbetter quality products andhigher levels of customer satis-faction and loyalty.

Businesses in search of highperformance today need to betreating warranty managementnot as a cost center, but as an asset thatcan create tangible shareholder value.Tavant was quick enough to identifythis for its customers.

As a leading diversified industrialorganization, Ingersoll-Rand (IR) spe-cializes in providing products, serv-ices, and integrated solutions toindustries ranging across various sec-tors. IR had multiple business unitsunder its belt, each of which had di-verse requirements and multiplelegacy systems. They needed a com-prehensive, one stop solution tostreamline the warranty process, initi-ate early detection and correction offailures and provide IR with a widerglobal reach. But IR’s challenge wasto retrieve information from its inde-pendent business units. Tavant identi-fied lack of inventory managementand visibility because of the presenceof disparate, independent systems.

Tavant Warranty Management Solu-tion – a one stop solution which inte-grated all the business units providedearly detection and resolution of flawsand reduced warranty costs. The sys-tem automated the claims processingcycle of Ingersoll-Rand by about 40percent and also facilitated a widerglobal reach by supporting global lan-guages and various currencies.“Through Tavant we can provide pow-erful technologies that will enable our

channel partners to greatly en-hance their marketing pro-grams and resources. Ourdealers provided valuable inputas we adapted Tavant’s tech-nologies for IR’s channels. Theresulting solution enables ourcustomers to benefit fromgreater access to IR equipmentand parts, as well as expandeddealer service,” says Herbert LHenkel, Chairman and CEO,Ingersoll Rand.

Great Place to WorkThe company is just not onlywell known for its uniquemodel and services, but it hasgot lot of acclaims as one of thebest employers. “We are not asausage factory, instead we arean open kitchen,” says Ma-hesh. Tavant believes in thephilosophy of transforming thelives, especially of the employ-ees. They are keen on groom-ing the employees and creatinga place where they can learnand grow. “The employees are

not just considered as employees butas stakeholders of the organization,”says Hassan Rashid, SVP, Head ofSales and Marketing, Tavant. The keyto Tavant’s success was the close co-ordination of the hierarchies within theorganization and bringing to desk in-novative suggestions given by em-ployees. In fact this has helped Tavantto score high in the work culture. Reg-ular open house discussions, opendoor policy, employee empowerment,innovation at work, trust in manage-ment, and openness to ideas and sug-gestions are the key highlights thatTavant hugely focuses on. There aregroups within the organization thatpromote partying; and every quarterthe company recognizes high achiev-ers, which encourages employees to bemore competitive. “In keeping withthe Tavant culture, we celebrate allachievements - big or small, together

as a team. We take fun seriously andbelieve in working hard and partyingharder,” says Tina Vas, Head of HR,Tavant.

Vas finds that people at Tavantlearn much faster. “When we starteddoing the trading and securities busi-ness, the key was to train our work-force to meet the client requirements,”she says. Tavant created a center of ex-cellence and has identified the areaswhere improvement is needed in itsservice line. They made sure thatworkforce at Tavant gets mentoringfrom the best of the specialists in theindustry and train their architects andsenior experts. Also, to be in pace withits competitors they make sure thattheir employees are kept updated byattending industry trade shows. Alongwith the center of excellence, the com-pany also has set up internal trainingand certification. For example, forconsumer lending there are computerbased trainings available for the em-ployees wherein they have exams andget certified. Almost all those workingon consumer lending - including theQA engineers, development engineers,and architects - have to go through thetest. “One of the customers liked this

concept and even wanted their engi-neers to go through the training,” saysRashid.

Tavant also offers a training pro-gram called Tavant Rookie InductionProgram (TRIP) for freshers, which isan intensive three month training pro-gram. The training is carried out byhigh performing internal employees.The company has also initiated train-ing and mentoring for first time man-agers. All the programs are hands-onand tailor-made for specific applica-tions. The company has an initiativecalled ‘innovate’ where people comeup with innovative plans and anyonecan approach top executives in the or-ganization to make their presentations.Tavant has made it mandatory to runthe appraisal process through the HRportal and makes it a process of con-tinuous feedback (rather than once insix months) to improve transparency.At Tavant Technologies, it’s all aboutpeople, passion and excellence.

Growth WaveWith 750 employees, Tavant Tech-nologies is on the cusp of a growthwave. With its unique multi- level en-gagement model and transparency, it

has become the cynosure among thecustomers especially in new verticalsoutside e-business. “We are activelyengaged in a number of new markets.With North America and India as pri-mary markets, we started growing inAsia pacific,” says Mahesh. Thoughthe company has set up a team thatfocuses on new verticals, its mainarea of focus will continue to be e-business where it has established sig-nificant credibility. But getting theright talent has increasingly becometough and will continue to be so in thecoming years, as it is tough to getpeople with the right attitude that jellwith Tavant’s culture.

Last year had been great for thecompany, for it won bigger companiesto their client portfolio. “I am confi-dent that Tavant will become an expertin each market we enter, offering un-questioned value, extraordinary serv-ice, and mutual success and growth forour customers, shareholders, and em-ployees. Tavant is well placed to takethe e-business and trading and securi-ties market by storm,” says Mahesh.But for him what is more important isto see a billion dollar smile on the faceof every customer. si

Leading Edge Front-end Capabilities

Speci�c functionality Specialization

Core Technologies

Core Technologies

AJAX, Flex, Silverlight User Experience Design

Rules Imaging OptimizationWork!ow

High Reliability Architecture Expertise

Pre-Approved Technology/ Middleware Open Source

SOA/REST High Performance Multi-Site

Certi�ed Global Process

Waterfall Agile Interactive

End-to-End IT Services

> Custom Application Development Services> Application Management Services (AMS, M&E)> QA, Testing & Performance Optimization Services> System/ Data Integration Services> Architecture & Design Services

TAVANT VALUE PROPOSITION

The solutions combineleading edge

technologies with business insights topower the next

generation and scalableoperations

Team during party


VVCC TTaallkk:: By Amit SudarshanThe author is Senior Analyst, Illinois Ventures

Large demographic, economic,and technology shifts are migrat-ing computing usage to mobiledevices with data and softwarehosted within a computation

cloud. While the success of mobile applica-tions has been a sudden surprise for many U.S.based firms, it was predicted by the success ofmobile and SMS based applications in Indiaand in South East Asia. Successful Indiancompanies such as JustDial are leveragingtheir learnings in the Indian mobile space, asthey start their U.S. operations. Much of thisprogress has been good for the consumer;however, the unfortunate trend towards pro-prietary app stores with stringent review pro-cedures has decreased consumer choice andincreased development risk.

Amazon Kindle was the first device of itskind to bundle wireless service with the priceof purchase. The ability of a consumer to haveimmediate connectivity without invoking athird party carrier became one of the main sell-ing points for the device, and it significantlyimproved the user experience. The bundlingof connectivity with purchase is going to bethe next ‘killer app’ for embedded devices. We

expect to see innovativenew devices that take ad-

vantage of ubiquitousconnectivity, as well as anecosystem of software ven-

dors that support themyriad regulatory andtechnical challenges as-sociated with managing

the network.Taking a longer-

term view, technol-ogy in the

semiconductor industry is ripe for transforma-tion. The progression of Moore’s Law willsoon require transistors beyond the physicallimitations of silicon-based transistors. Newmaterials, techniques, and equipment willneed to be devised to achieve this, and we arekeenly following the developments ingraphene as a material capable of solvingthese and many other problems. Additionally,solid-state storage devices, the wide deploy-ment of the GPGPU, and innovation in adver-tising formats, have always remained anexciting sphere to follow.

And with these abundant opportunitiesavailable, there is no better time than now tobe an entrepreneur. Times of uncertainty cre-ate opportunity, and are generally the timeswhen great companies are founded. Half of theFortune 500 companies were founded in a re-cession or bear market. That said, it does notmean that building a successful startup in a re-cession is easy. I advise you to have patienceand persistence, success is unlikely to be im-mediate or explosive, and will seem at times tobe out of reach. However by continuing thedaily process of building your business stepby step, you will eventually have built some-thing you can be proud to say is yours. si

MMoobbiillee CCoommppuuttiinngg AA NNeeww TTuurrnn--oonn ffoorr VVCC EEyyeess

Soon transistors beyond thephysical limitations of

silicon-based ones will be required. New materials,

techniques, and equipmentwill need to be devised to

achieve this

Amit Sudarshan

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10

NAME CEO FOUNDED DESCRIPTIONSerusSunnyvale,CAwww.serus.com

IInndduu NNaavvaarr 2001An enterprise software solution provider, that provides customizable softwaresystem. It has 100 employees. Its clientele includes AMD, Cisco, Flextronics. Ithas been funded by OBC ventures, Samsung Ventures and Diamond Head.

Leadforce1 Santa Clara,CAwww.leadforce1.com

SSrriihhaarrii KKuummaarr 2008 A marketing automation solution provider for enterprises. It has 150 employees.

Altierre San Jose,CAwww.altierre.com

SSuunniitt SSaaxxeennaa 2003Provider of wireless pricing solutions for large retail chains. Its number of em-ployees are close to 50. Its funded by DuPont Capital Management, ATA Ven-tures, Kinetic Ventures and Labrador Ventures.

Dyyno Palo Alto,CAwww.dyyno.com

RRaajj JJaasswwaa 2007 Provider of live streaming High Definition broadcasting. Its number of employ-ees are close to 20. It is funded by Artiman Ventures, Startup Ventures.

Fiorano Los Gatos, CAwww.fiorano.com

AAttuull SSaaiinnii 1995 A Service Oriented Architecture solution provider. It has 100 employees.

Openstream Somerset,NJwww.openstream.com

RRaajj TTuummuulluurrii 1997 A provider of secure mobile Internet infrastructure platform and applications. Ithas 500 employees.

Aerva Cambridge, MAwww.aerva.com

SSaannjjaayy MMaannaannddhhaarr 2003 Provides digital signage technology, enabling real-time interactivity betweenmobile applications and digital display networks. It has around 50 employees.

Vuclip Milpitas, CA www.vuclip.com

NNiicckkhhiill JJaakkaattddaarr 2007 A mobile video search site. It has 25 employees. It has raised funding fromNew Enterprise Associates and Jafco Ventures.

Jiffle Sunnyvale, CAwww.jifflenow.com

RRaajjeesshh SSeettttyy 2006 It provides solutions for calendar sharing over the web. It has around 30 em-ployees.

Moremagic Newton, MA www.moremagic.com

PPaannkkaajj GGuullaattii 2001It allows operators, content providers, and banks to offer consumers the abilityto purchase goods and services on demand using a mobile phone or the web.Its investors include Battery Ventures, Vision Capital, and Liberty Mutual.

Even in difficult economic times,technology develops rapidly and ITbusinesses cannot just sit back and

ride out the recession. Those wanting togrow, need both innovative products and anexceptional business plan.

Today, it is more important than everfor technology companies to have a strat-egy that focuses on clearly communicat-ing the business benefits. IT companiescan be very technically oriented and ef-forts to deliver outstanding products areoften at the expense of developing a clearbusiness strategy. The result is that thebest products aren't always the ones thatare most successful.

In the last year, it was never as true asever, everything revolved around customerfocus; what people you bring into the com-pany and when, what technology you buildand what features you add to the specifica-tion; everything. All these had to be con-stantly monitored, strategically planned andagressively put forth. Those who could dothis survived.

It is an interesting time to look or ratherrelook at the technology landscape. Theclouds of recession is slowly receding andbusinesses are getting back to normalcy.

At a time when several conglomeratesclosed down and many suffered a fatalblow, it was the startups and young busi-

nesses that held their nerve and shinedthrough. There were several new companiesthat boomed last year and several startupssaw successful exits like Mint, Jajah, Mi-mosa, Kazeon and more.

This is why we decided to bring out ourspecial issue on Top 10 promising compa-nies. To compile the list, we had deep dis-cussions with as many as 50 U.S. basedIndian entrepreneurs, whose hallmark istheir passion for their startups and long-termcommitment. But in the end we narroweddown the list to 10 promising companies thatdespite tough times continue to shine withtheir edgier ideas, smarter operations andsheer guts to do something different.

MOST PROMISINGTECH COMPANIES


Alarge B2B enter-prise in the ITsector hadgreat suc-cess in

driving enterprise visitorsto its website through mul-tiple marketing campaigns.However, out of 15,515visits from US companies,there were just 19 form fillswhich translates to a meager0.1 percent. Thus, it was un-able to effectively translate theopportunities provided by thewebsite visitor traffic, into sales.

The net result, it lost out in iden-tifying and converting a lot of prospectswho visited its website. Also the com-pany had no visitor tracking mechanismand was unable to assess and analyze vis-itor behavior on its site. This lack of in-formation and insight into the browsingbehavior of the visitor, limited the salesteam in developing a targeted pitch whenapproaching these visitors who regis-tered. The company also failed to deci-pher the stage of decision making thevisitor was in. Such information wouldhave enabled them to develop a morecustomized lead nurturing plan, resultingin shorter sales cycles.

But things changed once the com-pany approached LeadForce1. Founded

in 2008, the Santa Clara headquarteredcompany is a provider of next generationmarketing automation solutions.

After deploying LeadForce1, thecompany got 4,298 leads out of the15,515 visits, thus taking the conversionfrom 0.1 percent to 28 percent, a whop-ping 22,621 percent ROI! According tothe customer’s VP of Marketing, onceLeadForce1 was deployed, they startedphasing out forms from their corporatewebsite and felt that forms were a thingof the past with LeadForce1 in the pic-ture. LeadForce1 also gave rich and real-

time pipeline intelligence andmade marketing automation

intelligent. LeadForce1 trans-

formed the way thecompany’s sales andmarketing team ap-proached and re-

sponded to leadgeneration, lead manage-ment, and sales follow-through. UsingLeadForce1’s exhaustive

analytics reporting, the mar-keting team was able to deliver

key leads to their sales teamsacross geographies. A recent survey by IDC states that

50 percent of sales did not meet its quotalast year and the primary reason for thiswas that the sales team did not knowtheir customers well enough. “Onlinemarketing is rapidly displacing tradi-tional forms of marketing such as directmail, display advertising in print andelectronic media such as radio and TV.Despite a myriad of marketing activities,prospective customers visit the corporatewebsites as their first step. But mostcompanies are not equipped enough tofilter prospective clients from casual vis-itors and report on them in real time. It isto revolutionize the way B2B sales op-portunities are discovered and nurtured

The Next Google of theB2B sector?

LLeeaaddFFoorrccee11that we started leadForce1,” says SrihariKumar, CEO, LeadForce1.

With its next generation SaaS-basedmarketing automation solution for onlinemarketers, the company delivers a game-changing real-time marketing automa-tion solution for enterprises that convertsenterprise visits to the corporate websitesinto qualified sales leads, determineswebsite visitor interest and intent, and en-ables sales teams to reach decision-mak-ers more effectively and close dealsfaster using patented business intelli-gence and data mining technology. “Weprovide significantly richer lead data than

most solutions in the market today, en-abling enterprise sales and marketingteams to uncover hidden opportunities,accurately identify decision-makers, anddeliver powerful, targeted, real-time re-sponses and offers to potential customer.In simple terms, we help convert corpo-rate websites from online brochures intolead generation machines,” says Shree-sha Ramdas, COO, LeadForce1.

In most cases, websites have a land-ing page where in the visitors are askedto fill up a registration form stating theirinterest in the company. But in mostcases, online visitors suffer from form fa-tigue, resulting in them failing to fill outthe registration forms, hence causing themarketing team to lose out on valuableleads. What LeadForce1 does is analyzethe visitors in multiple ways. It deliversdaily email alerts containing detailed in-formation on website visits to the mar-keting, sales and executive teams. It alsoanalyses and sends valuable informationsuch as name of the company, possiblereason for visit, the intent or interest ofthe visitor in a particular topic or prod-

uct, the pattern or regular-ity of prospect visits, theidentification of the per-son in the prospect com-pany with the purchasingpower, and other buyingindicators.

With the help of allthe collective information

the internal sales team is able to easilyidentify and qualify web leads with thehelp of daily website reports; the directsales team is able to generate specific of-fers and packages to meet prospect re-quirements; and the marketing team isable to focus their marketing campaignson specific industry sectors that show thegreatest interest in the company’s prod-uct and technology.

Within a span of two years, the com-pany has made long strides in the indus-try and won over a large number ofcustomers. “LeadForce1 gives us action-able data for building our sales pipelinethat other services lack. Combined withits ease of use, the actionability makes itthe most effective lead generation solu-tion we’ve used for our website.” says ahappy customer, Bert Armijo, VP Salesat 3Tera, a division of the $12 Billion ITgiant, CA Inc. (NASDAQ:CA)

Kumar attributes the success of thecompany to two factors — striking a bal-ance between innovation and operationalexcellence and the fact that they chose to

enter the market at a prime time when theneed for marketing automation wasbeing felt by the industry.

Despite a good run over the last year,there is an immense challenge that liesahead of the company. “Though the mar-ket is transitioning, there are many cor-porates who are yet to open up to nextgeneration solution like ours. Educatingthe industry about new developments isgoing to be the primary task for us in nextfew years,” explains Kumar Malavalli,the company’s Chief Strategy Officer.Then there is also the advent of compe-tition from other players like the CRMsolution providers, web analytics com-panies, and marketing automation play-ers who are looking at expanding to thisnew market. But Malavalli is confidentthat the company has the IP advantageand the first mover advantage to keep itahead in the league.

Since its founding, LeadForce1 hasbeen rapidly riding the growth trajectoryand becoming a critical contributor tothe industry in terms of intellectualproperty. With the B2B lead generationmarket estimated to be a $75 billionmarket, the future looks extremelypromising for LeadForce1. “With themarket as big as this, there is anotheropportunity to create a GOOGLE in theB2B segment,” says Kumar. If he playshis cards well, LeadForce1 may just be-come the one! si

50 percent of sales did notmeet its quota last year and theprimary reason for this was thatthe sales team did not knowtheir customers well enough

MOST PROMISING TECH COMPANIES10

By Vimali Swamy From L-R: John Armstrong-, CMO, Sushil Jha, Chief Revenue Officer, Kumar Malavalli - Chief StrategyOfficer, Shreesha Ramdas, COO, Srihari Kumar, CEO, Brian Warren - VP Customer Success


organizations and high-tech OEMswithin Fortune 500 and mid-marketcompanies meet the demands of theirmarket more efficiently. In short, ithelps one with unprecedented insightinto one’s business and aid in makingbetter financial and operational deci-sions

Indu founded the company in 2001and bootstrapped it with some of theearly clients that includes Cisco, Span-sion and a few others, who adopted thecompany’s services. Company gotventure backed financing in late 2005and today has global clientele that in-cludes AMD, Nvidia, Entropic, Ath-eros, Cisco, Flextronics, ThermoFisher, Boston Scientific to name afew. Serus has firmed its foothold inthree major business verticals —Semiconductors, Hi-tech system man-ufacturers and medical devices, espe-cially the first two.

“What we do is help companiesmanage their operations by runningour solution on the existing ERP sys-tems, be it Oracle or SAP, to work outside the four walls and collaboratewith their extended outsourced part-ners,” explains Indu. When a companydeploys Serus’s solution, it addressesan organization’s three main painpoints, operations, finance and IT. Inoperations management and IT, Serushelps in executing everyday tasks liketracking and tracing day to day infor-mation, product specifications, testingscripts and sending other project in-formation to the partners, managing allthe inventory information that goesback and forth, over its product plat-form. Further, it manages all the fi-nancial information like the actual costor the invoice that is paid to the out-sourced manufacturers and collabo-rates it with the systems at the partnerand supplier site.

The company’s flagship solutionis Intelligent Operations Management(IOM) that includes data aggregationand content management, includingfacilities for data cleaning and error

resolution, combined with collabora-tion across the extended enterprise.Our customers recognize that IOMremoves the need for large, complexspreadsheets that are difficult tomaintain and audit, and that it in-cludes a set of modules for businessfunctions on a platform that supportsadvanced reporting, decision-making,and action-taking.

The entire product of the companydeploys cloud computing there bymaking it private and public as perclient requirement. Having a cloudbased solution also adds and edge tothe product as Serus is able to manageeverything from deployment to up-grading from a remote site. “It allowsus to take way is the way to take re-sponsibility for everything that is hap-pening in the customer site. This isunlike the old school software modewhere there is no feedback loop andthe ownership and partnership is miss-ing,” says India.

Though the company is almost adecade old, the company has notfound any serious competition asIndu believes that Serus is the onlycompany to provide subscription so-lution with end to end footprint for itscustomers to manage their out-

sourced requirements. The only com-pany that she experiences time totime is when companies try replicat-ing the solution in-house. “A major-ity of the competition comes from theclients trying to create an IP or up-grade system internally but I find it ano brainer. While with Serus one notonly gets a solution that is cheaperand cost effective but also produc-tized with in 4-6 weeks as opposed toan internal project that takes 6-9months to start on,” India explains.

Since the company delivers its so-lution on cloud, it has found that thepay per use option as most attractingto its clients, small, medium andlarge organizations, likewise. But themost challenging aspect of being inthe business Indu feels is making or-ganizations realize the importance ofoperations management solution. Butthe recent recession has brought a sil-ver lining for Serus. Since the down-turn, most organizations are strivingto be lean while increasing theirprofit margin.

Analysts too have recognizedManufacturing Operations Manage-ment as a $4 billion market and this isjust in the semiconductor, hi-tech elec-trical manufacturer and medical de-vices sector alone. This opens up avast opportunity for Serus. This is whythe company plans to hire 20-25 morepeople by year end. At present it has50 employees in the U.S. and 10 inIndia.

Since, incorporation, Serus hasbeen on a momentum of high growth.The company has already raised $19million in two rounds of venture fund-ing from OVP ventures, SamsungVentures and Diamond Head.Indu is very optimistic about the futurefor, Serus is in a unique position be-cause the market it is in is only goingto grow in near future. With most com-panies giving up their manufacturingfacilities and opting for outsourcedmanufacturers, Serus is confident onriding the growth wave. si

Aleading graphic carddesigner, Nvidia haspartnered with sev-eral manufacturers towhich it outsourced

the manufacturing of its graphiccard. Although the company had anefficient ERP system, it was not ableto keep up the information fromflowing to and from outside the 4walls with the suppliers and henceunable to track early problems. Dueto the disconnect between all itspartners and suppliers, the companysuffered in providing manufacturingspecifications at real time therebyincreasing the error and supplycycle.

In order to solve the crisis,Nvidia approached Serus, an up-coming company that provides in-telligent management solutions.Serus, deployed its solution on topof Nvidia’s existing ERP system andconnected it to all its outsourcedmanufacturing partners and suppli-ers, effectively allowing it to sharethe manufacturing specs and collab-orate on other occasions. With in afew months of deploying the newsolution Nvidia saw the margin of

error reduce from 70 errors a weekto zero errors now. Serus also helpedit decrease the supply cycle timefrom 2 days a week to 2 hours.

Headquartered in Sunnyvale,Serus provides enterprises with In-telligent Operations Managementsolutions. “What we do is provide acloud based B2B solutions for en-terprises to manage everyday opera-tions for outsourced manufacturingcompanies helping them align withtheir numerous partners and suppli-ers,” explains Indu Navar, CEO,Serus.

Serus’ configurable softwarehelps global organizations integratebusiness processes and rule driversamong trading partners to achievecommon production goals. Its realtime technology provides instanta-neous automated transactions, co-managed inventory, andperformance measurements across acompany’s worldwide value chain. The company’s technology, domain,and operations experience has led tothe development of a solution that ishelping operations managers and ex-ecutives at semiconductor compa-nies, contract manufacturing

SerusManaging OutsourcedOperations IntelligentlyBy Vimali Swamy

Analysts have recognized Manufacturing Operations Management as a$4 billion marketand this is just thesemiconductor, hi-tech electricalmanufacturer andmedical devicessector alone.

MOST PROMISING TECH COMPANIES10

Indu Navar

It is nothing less than losing a fortune for the makers of the new Indiaas well as the change agents of a new world order. The sudden death ofCK Prahalad has created a void among the business and technologyleaders of India. A man of ideas and a social thinker, his ideas andthoughts laid the foundation of new India with his significant impact on

management literature and the practice of business globally for a long time.. From company chairmen to entrepreneurs to students of management, Pra-

halad’s popularity has transcended beyond other thinkers of his times. Theman who saw fortune at the bottom of the pyramid, was intensely passionateabout his country, India, and dedicated to being a catalyst for bringing lastingchange to the land. He tirelessly flew back and forth from the US to Indiamany times a year with a quest to help spur minds and hearts to create newwealth and opportunity there. His ideas will endure and will help many oth-ers seek new hope and wealth.

Prahalad was recognized as one of the top 10 management thinkers andwas well known for his book The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid. Itis this theory that many corporations are following in global emerging mar-kets. He indulged in consulting engagements for Indian corporates such asthe Tatas and HLL and even emerging companies like inverter maker Su-Kam. His research specializes in corporate strategy and the role and valueadded of top management in large, diversified, multinational corporations.

Born into a big family - he was one of the nine children of his par-ents - Prahalad joined Union Carbide after obtaining a degree in physicsfrom the University of Madras. Later did a post graduation course at theIndian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad (IIM-A) and went toHavard Business School for Doctor of Business Administration degreein 1975. After teaching in IIM-A he went back to the U.S. and joined

University of Michigan.Prahalad was the first recipient of the Lal Bahadur Shastri Award for

contributions to management and public administration in 2000. He wasalso awarded the country's third highest civilian honor, the Padma Bhushan,in 2009.

Prahalad did try his hand in business and founded Praja Inc. However, hesold the company off soon after.

Prahalad called himself as a serial entrepreneur with his reputation as hisrisk capital. "I generate ideas and sell them as books. If the ideas are of valueto the customer, the book sells well or else it bombs. I risk my reputation,"he said. Prahalad authored several books like "The Fortune at the Bottom ofthe Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profit", "Competing for the Fu-ture" with Gary Hamel, "The Future of Competition" with Venkat Ra-maswamy, "The New Age of Innovation" with M.S.Krishnan.

The world has definitely lost a great mind and thought leader. But hisideas will continue to live and find fortunes at the bottom of the pyramid.


A Tribute toC K Prahalad

S. Somasegar, Senior Vice President, Developer Division,Microso

Whenever I had the op-portunity to chat withProfessor CK Prahalad, I

was amazed by his innovative ideas and deepinsight about using capitalism to raise thestandard of living for the four billion peopleat the bottom of the economic pyramid.

I first met CK at the CEO Summit atCochin back in 2003 under the auspices ofMata Amritanandamayi (Amma) and thethen President of India, Dr. Abdul Kalam. Igot a chance to ride the bus with him for anhour and half from the hotel to the Ashram.Seated next to each other, we had a great con-versation about the potential of India. I wasintrigued and energized by his strategic think-ing about the role of government versus en-trepreneurial spirit as a self-sustainingphenomenon to really help the poor. He hadgreat insight into what drives governmentleaders and entrepreneurs, and used that in-sight to develop his thoughts on the appro-priate role for each. I had the good fortune ofmeeting CK again when he visited Microsoin Seattle a few years later to talk to seniorleaders at the company. Again, we had a veryinsightful conversation - this time how tech-nology, with its ability to provide access to in-formation and ability to scale easily, canenable new business models that can serve thebottom of the pyramid.

I remember that in the beginning CK'sideas seemed very radical to the world. Ad-vocates for the bottom four billion peoplecomplained that the sheer idea of makingprofits from poor is evil. Capitalists com-plained that there is no market at the bottomof the pyramid. Over time, CK made thesetwo extremist groups come closer together tosee things more comprehensively. e formergroup began realizing that instead of giving aman a fish today, it is a better longer term so-lution to teach a village how to fish so that thevillagers can be self-sufficient. e lattergroup is realizing that once a village learnshow to fish, it will be an even bigger consumermarket in the future. I'm looking forward toa bright future for the entire world where CK'sideas are implemented even more pervasively.

CK’s passing is a huge loss, but I amconfident that his ideas and strategic think-ing will have a long-lasting broad impacton this world.

Som Mittal, Chairman, NASSCOM

Prof CK Prahalad wasa visionary muchahead of his time and Ihave always admired

his phenomenal thoughts, foresight andability to explain the most complex issuewith simple examples. My last meetingwith him was in February 2009, whereindespite a grueling schedule, he agreed todrive for 3 hours from Lonavala to Mum-bai to deliver the valedictory address at theNASSCOM India Leadership Forum 2009.He spoke about how the economic crisis isan opportunity for organizations to re-en-gineer their businesses and create newmodels of delivering products and services.In fact, while presenting the Global IndiaAward to him at this event, I was touchedby his humility and kind words aboutNASSCOM and the industry.

Prof Prahalad has had a very long as-sociation with NASSCOM and first spokeat the NASSCOM annual event in 1996,when Narayana Murthy invited him to doa day-long workshop for the industryCEOs. At that time the industry and itsleadership was evolving and that day-longworkshop helped the CEOs truly under-stand the need to create a competitive ad-vantage and value differentiator.

His work on India@75; Fortune at thebottom of the Pyramid; Innovation, Entre-preneurship have le a deep impact andthe country will truly miss its finest man-agement thinker and guru. While he maybe no more, his ideas and work have cre-ated a roadmap for India and all of usshould strive to take this to conclusion andcreate the impact that he had envisaged.at would be truly be the best way to ho-nour Prof Prahalad and his contribution toIndia.

Phaneesh Murthy,President & CEO,iGATEI admired his passionfor India and for be-lieving that the locusof innovation wouldover time movethere. A dream that we must all strive tomake a reality.

Ashok Soota, Executive Chairman,MindTree

He has been recog-nized for his thinkingand contribution inareas such as corecompetence and for-tune at the bottom ofthe pyramid. Not enough people havewritten on his consulting capabilities.He was a wonderful facilitator and hada way of helping leaders to think differ-ently and see a broader road aheadthrough a process of logical thinking.

K B Chandrasekhar,founder-CEO, Jamcracker

He was one man whowas able to translateacademic ideas intopractically imple-mentable ones. Heworked in the field in

his dream to transform the bottom ofthe pyramid. He would visit Dharaviand remote villages along with his wifeGayatri to meet with people there andsaw how economic uplifting of those is aviable business opportunity and evan-gelized it.

He had sent some of his research inthe past to get my feedback and was ex-cited by new groundbreaking thoughtsin areas of collaboration, frictionless in-formation systems to mention a few. heprofiled jamcracker in his book as wellas he saw some of what we were doingwere pushing the envelope of how futureondemand systems would evolve.

He straddled different worlds at easeand commanded tremendous respect forhis intellectual capability and able tospeak the language of the target seg-ment—academia, G-50 boards, socialtransformation to name a few.

My wife Sukanya and I had met withhim and his wife Gayatri several timesand it was always a blast and they madeexcellent partners. He loved my chil-dren. We will miss him dearly. It is aloss that is irreplaceable. My prayers arewith Gayatri and his family and may hissoul rest in peace. si

(August 8, 1941 - April 17, 2010)

C K Prahalad


Just pull out of your intelligencein relation to 2009 and authenti-cally talk about the foremost en-terprise software which, by andlarge, was recognized for its

acronym EIS. The formulations havebeen battened and the write downs havebeen in black and white. They continuedto exist in 2009 and the economy andcorporate IT spending rebounded in2010. I am used to memorize the saying‘When the things get tough the tough getgoing’. Information Systems have beendocumented as the ‘enabler’ of businessin the 21st century. The speedy augmen-tation of IT within America, India, andother parts of the world forebode an ac-complishment for companies that ex-pand operations worldwide. This mightnot have been the case a few years backbut is unquestionably true of the present.As a teacher of information systems I al-ways hear students inquire, “Why thecourse materials are so quickly out-dated?” We tell them that teaching en-terprise information systems is liketeaching the big bang theory in 60 sec-onds, or rather a one minute after theevent. The future is still being formed.Technology is always on the increaseand change is endemic in enterprise sys-tem managements. One can do well onlyby being on top of the ongoing changes.

One of the foremost FAQ is thatthere is no clear-cut reply, but to crackthis predicament, split a big dilemma

into many smaller ones. Before talkingin depth about EIS, let us begin with in-formation and systems. Informationtouches all human activity – it is repeat-edly said that we live in the ‘informationage’. Information is an imperative foun-dation to an organization. It representsthe organization’s tangible and intangi-ble resources and all transactions relat-ing to those resources. Informationinfluences the approach an organizationtakes to. The right information, if it is de-livered to the right person, in the rightfashion, and at the right time, candemonstrate the technique to progressand make organizational efficacy and ca-pability more assured. Software has al-ways been beneficial to a single purpose,delivering leading-edge job schedulingand application automation solutions tooptimize the efficiency of growing IToperations. The blending of Internettechnologies in the management of long-established business concerns is impact-

ing all industries and is understandablythe latest chapter in the ongoing evolu-tion of business. Take the automotive in-dustry which entirely follows thezero-inventory concept. for instanceKanban and Kaizen approach. Since thepioneering of division-of-labor approachto manufacturing, the industry hasmoved to embracing innovative ap-proaches by reengineering businessprocesses; implementing materials re-quirement planning (MRP), manufactur-ing resource planning (MRP II), andjust-in-time (JIT) manufacturing; and in-stalling enterprise resource plans (ERP)software. Today, the Internet is drivingthe contemporary industry goals ofachieving a five-day order-to-deliverycycle, global reach, and personalization.It is behind decisions to outsource man-ufacturing; it is redefining the responsi-bility of dealers and their affiliation withthe consumers, and renewing the role ofthe brand owner.

Today, a large portion of technologyresources is being dedicated to comply-ing with the ever-changing regulatory re-quirements from a myriad of sources. Atthe threshold of the new millennium,there is a marked shift in the businessparadigm. An enterprise information sys-tem is a breed of computing system char-acteristically offering a high level ofservice, dealing with massive volumesof data, and capable of supporting com-plex organizations (an enterprise). ERPpresents companies with the ability tohomogenize and automate businessprocesses throughout the organization,thus increasing productivity and reduc-ing cycle time. Even though ERP sys-tems have delivered value, it is becomingunderstandable that the ERP model,which wraps organizational processesinto one end-to-end application, may nolonger be sufficient for today’s fast-mov-ing, extended enterprises. The businessenvironment has changed spectacularlywith the rapid growth of the Internet.

New Technologies, New OptionsOver the most recent years, e-commercehas turned out to be a widespread move-ment for numerous enterprises. Some ofthem dived into this face up to avoid tak-

ing into description the enlighteningchanges that concern the state of affairs,as well as the communications essentialto persist with the original scheme.Nowadays, most companies are high-lighting their e-business efforts on trou-ble-free e-buy and e-sell applications.The foremost philosophy is ‘fabricate itand they will come’. Two of the earlyniche players in this area, Siebel in cus-tomer relationship management (CRM)software and i2 in supply-chain man-agement (SCM) software, are quite largeand are squeezing ERP vendors fromoutside the enterprise. The best example

is change in the pedagogy, as we hadshifted from the ‘brick and mortar’ sys-tem to the ‘click and mortar’ system.

When we view the things in an in-formation system perspective we can un-derstand that it is the software andhardware systems that shore up data-in-tensive applications. A majority of work-ers today are knowledge workers whocreate, distribute, and or use information.This includes bankers, coordinators,caseworkers, counselors, community or-ganizers, programmers, insurance advi-sors, consultants, and so on. A criticallyimportant question is ‘Whether there isa need in our organization for an EIS?’.This is a very difficult question, meritinga great deal of study. The followingpoints bear on this matter:� About 80 percent of an executive’s

time is devoted to receiving, com-municating, and using information.

� Information is the starting point forvirtually all activities performed inan organization.

� Key organizational ingredients in or-ganizations include people and in-formation, and using theseingredients efficiently is critical tosuccess.

� Effective utilization of informationsystems in management is impera-tive.

� Productive use of information is alsoimportant.

� Information is a resource to augmentcompetence, effectiveness, and com-petitiveness of an enterprise.

In short, the Internet will accomplish fortoday’s business what the assembly linedid for the manufacturing industry abouta century ago. On the other hand, with-out connecting order delivery, manufac-turing, financial, human resources, andother back-office systems to the Internet,even companies with long track recordsof innovation cannot succeed. All com-panies, however, will need updating theirbusiness infrastructures and changing themode of their response to instanta-neously respond to customer needs. si

Divergence between ERP Systems and EcommerceApplications

The users of ERP software are workers of an organization,while ecommerce applications are unwrapped to the public. E-commerce applications have built-in new generation web-based ERP systems, which may lead to straightforwardintegration.

User Interface Design: ERP software automates multifaceted busi-ness processes and transforms the way workers interact. ERPusers over and over again go from the beginning to the end oflengthy training sessions to gain knowledge of how to use ERP sys-tems. It is logical to design sophisticated workflow processes to fitorganizations' business processes. Complexity of System: A complex system is a system self-pos-sessed of unified parts that demonstrate one or more properties to-gether (performance among the possible properties) that are notrecognizable from the properties of the individual parts.

A Great Paradigm Shift in e-Enterprise Perspectives

EEnntteerrpprriissee IInnffoorrmmaattiioonn SSyysstteemmss

TTeecchhnnoollooggyy:: By Dr Subodh Kesharwani

ERP provides companies with theability to homogenizeand automate businessprocesses throughoutthe organization, thusincreasing productivityand reducing cycletime

The author is an Assistant Professor at IGNOU

The planet may be getting smarter, but it is also getting more dynamic and harder topredict; particularly the business world. Everything from swings in markets to in-creasing global competition to new consumer expectations is changing at a furiouspace. How do businesses evolve to adapt and respond dynamically?

We also live in a time when people want to communicate in realtime, anytime, anywhere. In-formation and expertise abound, but gaining required insight from them is harder than ever.Workers want to use new tools and personal technology to accomplish their goals. How do peo-ple collaborate to maximize effectiveness?

Businesses must embrace change by creating a more agile, collaborative, and connectedbusiness environment. Setting a collaboration agenda can make a company more profitable andproductive, while giving people a better quality of work and life.

Asian Paints is a great example of a major company that embraced a collaboration agenda.The company deployed IBM Lotus Notes Enterprise Messaging, IBM Lotus Quickr, and IBMLotus Sametime software for realtime team collaboration, IBM Domino Messaging for Black-berry Enterprise Service, and Lotus Traveler. Today, this platform connects and helps approxi-mately 4,000 users collaborate from 130 locations across India.

A collaboration agenda differentiates your business by redefining the way your peo-ple work. It’s about cost effectively building and deepening connections among people,systems, and processes in and beyond the boundaries of an organization. Collabora-tion helps the organization by discovering and combining expertise and informa-tion in time and in context, and tapping in to world-class expertise from anywhere.It can be structured without delays and distractions or high costs. Collabora-tion can also contribute to better product development by connecting peo-ple to drive insight and deepen relationships to collaborate on new

products and approaches.


The world is becoming more con-nected economically, socially, andtechnically. In this process, humans arekey to systems becoming instru-mented, interconnected, and intelli-gent. People are the ultimate sensorswhere latency in business processesstill exist, and where data is used tomake decisions. As a result, we alsohave to focus on enabling people towork more naturally and efficiently, es-sentially without obstacles. Businessleaders can solve challenges and ad-dress opportunities by better enablingpeople important to them, both insideand outside their organizations, aroundestablished business processes, and byindustry-specific roles and patterns.First, it’s critical to define challenges,issues, and risks across the roles andpatterns within a particular businessarea. Then, it can be determined howcollaboration can solve those chal-lenges and improve real business re-sults such as increased revenue,decreased cost, reduced risk, and raisedcustomer satisfaction among other ben-efits.

Begin looking at business areas andstrategic priorities that can be best ad-dressed with investments in collabora-tion. Where can you make the greatestimpact if you could unleash the poten-tial of your workforce by freeing peo-ple from the hard-wired organizationalbarriers that slow them down?

Many other organizations agreethat adapting and responding dynami-cally is the key. According to IBM’sGlobal CEO Study, 98 percent ofCEOs say that they will restructure theway their organizations work. The gapbetween CEOs who expect change andthose who have the ability to handlechange has widened sharply. And aHarris Interactive Poll shows that two-thirds of people can’t find the help theyknow is available.

Setting an agenda for collaborationis a systematic approach to realizingmeasurable business value from im-proving the way people interact spe-

cific to their job roles, functional area,and industry. This enables an organiza-tion become expertise-based and col-laborate across their entire internal andexternal population - including em-ployees, partners, suppliers, customers,and even investors - in the context ofhow they work.

Two key characteristics shared bythe top quartile of companies mostadaptable to change are: being effec-tive at collaborating and connectingexperts, IBM studies show.

In addition, a study by McKinsey& Company in January 2009 shows

that those who collaborate and connectexperts well reap measurable businessbenefits - a median reduction in oper-ating costs for core business processesof 15 percent, 25 percent improvementin customer marketing conversions, 17percent rise in customer loyalty, and a20 percent reduction in time-to-market for new products and services.

To set a collaboration agenda, busi-nesses should� Establish a clear strategy that

makes fluid connections and in-teractions across customers, part-ners, and employees,

� Design a roadmap that balancesbusiness impact, adoption, and in-vestment,

� Optimize their organization - spe-cific role interaction patternsshowing how people really, worktogether, and

� Define tangible metrics to meas-ure return-on-investment.

How Do You Get Started?Start by asking yourself tough businessquestions such as1. Does your organization change ef-

fectively when it needs to?2. Do you empower people to work

wherever and whenever they needto?

3. Can you quickly and easily find theright information and expertise?

4. Are you spending time searchingfor information and not getting any-where?

5. Are you making optimal use of peo-ple and resources inside and outsidethe organization?

6. Do your systems take so long tochange that they slow business re-sponse?

7. Are your major business processesstuck in silos?

Answering these questions honestly maylead to the blueprint for a collaborationagenda - a view of the ultimate organiza-tion of the future that is yours. si

BBuussiinneessss:: By Karthik PadmanabhanThe author is Country Manager, IBM Lotus Software

of Today’s Dynamic Business Climate

PPllaannnniinngg iiss tthheeBBeesstt WWaayy ttoo GGeettttiinngg AAhheeaadd

We live in a timewhen people want tocommunicate in realtime, anytime,anywhere. Information and expertise abound,but gaining requiredinsight from them isharder than ever

In this fiscal majority of largefirms are giving top priorityto innovation, says a latest report by The Boston Con-

sulting Group. The companies are increasingtheir innovation spending

and their satisfaction with thereturn on innovation

spending has climbed. Butcompanies remain somewhatcautious, keeping a close eye

on the cost of their innovation activities and raising their emphasis on

conservative bets.

rise rather quickly. A recently popularsite Please Rob Me (http://pleaser-obme.com) has already begun takingadvantage of the Twitter location fea-ture. Imagine what can be done by astalker following someone on Twitteror a deranged ex-boyfriend followingthe girl based on the events she is at-tending on Facebook and LinkedIn?It’s easy to see how you can giveaway all your personal informationwithout even thinking of it.

Trends towards making informa-tion available will lead to insecurity.Insecurity will lead to data breachesand compromise. Compromise willlead to lots of crying, money lost, andprobably lawsuits and other painfulresults. How do we get past this So-cial Media Insecurity?

What Can You Do to Protect Your-self in Social Media?So what are the challenges of socialmedia? Social media encourages:� Lack of privacy and delineation

between personal and business � Encouraging information sharing

beyond what is necessary� Giving away answers to security

questions that help identify you inthe financial world

� Social engineering by using yourpersonal information for nefariouspurposes

With these sites, people install appli-cations without knowing what goes onin the background, and it’s easy todownload malicious code to yourcomputer. There are no external thirdparty audits of these applications be-fore they make it to your Facebookapplication. Your computer can beeasily infected by a virus or spyware.

What Should the Social MediaUsers Do to Protect Their Informa-tion?1. No Personal information: This isanti-social networking, but there arethings you can limit about what youpost. Don’t post your Birthday, or

your address, your mother’s middlename, or any really personal data.Think before you post that profile.2. Limit who can view and contactyou: Don’t let your profile be trulypublic, restrict to people you know forrequested users. Remember that youcan’t retract information you put outthere; so be careful who can see thatpersonal data. 3. Don’t trust strangers: Your motherwas right, don’t open the door tostrangers. Limit who you accept tochat or friend requests as well as eventhose you communicate with. This isobviously even more important forchildren.

4. Trust no profile: People lie, it’s sadbut true. So profiles lie, they mightsay they went to your college or highschool. They might be interested inyour group, so don’t take anyone attheir word. Vet anyone who contactsyou with others in your social net-work. 5. Restrict your privacy: There aresome configuration settings in all thesocial media applications that allowyou to turn on some restrictions onyour privacy. Take a minute to actu-ally look at them. One easy exampleis in 6. Facebook where you can creategroups that you can place friends in;you don’t have to let your businesscontacts see what your friends areposting.7. Password management: An oldiebut a goodie; always use a strongpassword and don’t share it. Andchange it periodically. And do notmake it anything related to your per-sonal information such as your wife’sname or child’s name.8. Layers of protection: You should berunning a personal firewall and an-tivirus software on the machine youare viewing social networks in. Thiswill help if a malicious piece of soft-ware tries to download something toyour machine. Keep your protectionsoftware up-to-date as well and runthe patch management software onyour machine, this is especially im-portant for Windows users.9. Child protection software: Youshould have some kind of child pro-tection software running on machines,which children under 13 are using.This will help with all that shady soft-ware that are out there. More impor-tantly, educate your children about thedangers of social networking and whocould be stalking them on the Internet.

Restrict your email: Avoid postingyour email in your profiles for every-one to see. It’s a very easy way to geton a spam list and once that happensyou will never get off the list. si

si l i con ind ia |35|M a y 2 0 1 0s i l i con ind ia |34|M a y 2 0 1 0

One of the greatest chal-lenges to privacy andsecurity in the next sev-eral years is Social Net-works and Social

Media. Sites like Facebook, Twitter,LinkedIn, MySpace, and others canspell the downfall of valuing informa-tion. The ability to share and provideinformation is completely opposite tonetwork security requirements. This isreally encouraging people to do thingsthat are not security conscious activi-

ties. Millions of peo-

ple have multiple ac-counts in Facebook,

Twitter, Myspace, andLinkedin, just toname a few. Butsharing of infor-

mation has movedbeyond your personal cir-

cle of friends

a n dfamily.Social media is

becoming less socialand more… well, more

corporate. You can equate itto many peopleshouting in a bar,you are all in closeproximity, but youcan’t distinguish

the individual conversations, youcan’t make out who the people really

are, or who is a potential quality rela-tionship. Someone you do not wantcontacting you in that bar can easilyfind you if they want to, because youhave put yourself out there.

How many random friend requestsdo you get now from Facebook,Friendster, MySpace, LinkedIn, and soon? Too many is the case with mostpeople. Twitter is a bit different obvi-ously, but that is a whole other secu-rity nightmare waiting to happen.People are also getting bombardedwith corporate Fanpages, Groups, andother means of luring you to their sites,brands, and social following. This isthe erosion of your true social circle.You have basically joined a publicforum rather than a social network.

Social Media Security is reallymore about ’insecurity’. The distribu-tion of your information across multi-ple platforms used to be in a restrictedcircle. Now it’s pretty much every-where. You can find a person’sLinkedIn profile with a genericGoogle search. This should be re-stricted to the LinkedIn environment,but it’s not. You can then find theirFacebook page, get to know all theirfamily, and compile a pretty extensivelist about that person. A new sitewww.gist.com does basically that. Itcan be a great sales tool to find outeverything about a prospect, or it canbe a great tool to stalk someone.

With the advent of location basedservices, we will see physical insecu-rity based on social media usage on the

Insecurity?Social MediaWhat is

TTeecchhnnoollooggyy:: By Gary BahadurThe author is CEO and Founder, KRAA Security.He can be reached at [email protected]. The social networks

can be a great salestool to find out everything about aprospect, or they canbe a great tool at thehands of someone tostalk a person as ahelpless prey

A recent study done by Eric Williams of the ArizonaState University has revealedthat developing countries willtrash double the e-waste ofdeveloped countries by 2016.

It foresees in 2030 developing countries discard-

ing 400 million to 700 million obsolete personal

computers (PCs) per year ascompared to 200 million-300

million in developed countries.


Notice the use of ‘and so on’ in each ofthe samples above. It is important toidentify the ‘and so ons’ in detail foryour organization for each activity.

Reuse by chance or conveniencecan be dangerous. You don’t want toreuse something that failed earlier likea bad design or buggy component li-brary. It is therefore important to planthe reuse. To do that, separate the ‘best’from the ‘rest’ and the ‘showcases’from the ‘no-cases’. Knowledge repos-itory or a knowledge management sys-tem therefore becomes a necessity.

To facilitate a wider acceptance ofreuse and to get the highest productiv-ity through assembly line specializa-tion, it is also very important tosegregate the generics from thespecifics. The generics can be reusedwhile the specifics cannot. Any newproject will have three kinds of tasks –the complex, common, and the repeti-tive ones. Plan the project in such a waythat the complex tasks are done by theexperts, common tasks are picked upfrom the reusable library (or created forthe first time and added to the reusablelibrary), and the repetitive tasks aredone by the assembly line software de-veloper.

AutomatePerhaps the major contributor to speed-ing up the SDLC is automation. As with‘reuse’, ‘automation’ can also be donein each of the essentials in the SDLC.Project planning tools have been in ex-istence for a long time and are widelyused in software projects too.

There are many design tools thatnot only create good looking designs,but also generate code stubs to kickstart the development. A design toolthat seamlessly works with the devel-opment tool would be ideal for speed-ing up the SDLC.

Gone are the days where a text edi-tor was used for programming; IDE(Integrated Development Environment)is now a bare minimum to start with.IDE gives the developers a common

platform to develop, build, debug, andcompile code. Sophisticated IDEs alsohave ‘intellisense’ or keyword lookupsas you type to assist the developer inwriting code faster. They also generatesections of code as needed.

What were until recently consid-ered to be manual tasks – like code re-view and testing – can also beautomated. As a project or companygrows, managing code standardsthroughout the team becomes virtuallyimpossible. A code auditing tool be-comes especially useful in such a situ-ation. It helps eradicate bugs, ensureconsistency, and maintain clean, large,and complex source code. What’s more– the process of identifying warningsand errors hardly takes few minutes.There are tools to compute the codemetrics like coupling, depth of inheri-tance, and overall maintainability.‘Refactoring’ tools help in cleaning upthe code and making it more efficient.

Compilation and build processesshould be tightly integrated with theversion control systems. In addition tofacilitating the check-in and check-outprocesses, the version control and con-figuration tools can also be tuned to bethe gatekeepers of clean code. A check-in can be blocked if it breaks the build.Continuous integration and automatedbuilds save the headaches of integrationissues and build version issues.

Deployment automation is pro-vided as a feature in some of the so-phisticated IDEs. ‘One click’deployment ensures that the developersdon’t have to worry about spendingmany days and nights creating deploy-ment packs and procedures.

IntegrateIt is very important to integrate the‘reuse’ and ‘automation’ tools wher-ever possible. Higher levels of inte-gration ensure higher productivity.The SDLC tools should facilitate thedeveloper to use the right reusableartifact. Software engineers shouldget a seamless view between theplan, analysis, design, development,testing, and deployment. � Integrate the project manage-

ment and project documentationtool with the IDE

� Integrate the design processesand reusable artifacts as tem-plates inside IDE

� Have code snippets embeddedinto the IDE

� Create project templates, formtemplates, class templates, andso on

� Embed your coding standardsinto the code review tool

� Compilation of a unit shouldalso run the code review tooland give recommendations

� Build should succeed only if thecode review and automated unittesting pass

There are many more areas of inte-gration of ‘reuse’, ‘automation’, andthe SDLC processes. Looking formore areas of ‘reuse’, ‘automation’,and ‘integration’ is a continuous andnever ending process. It is high timewe start building and using softwarefor software development life cycle.

I conclude with this simple for-mula: Rapid Application Develop-ment (RAD) = Reuse + Automate +Integrate (R+A+I). si

With software goingbig and complexand customers be-coming more de-manding than ever

before, there is a need to ensure speed,consistency, accuracy, security, quality,and reliability. How long will the soft-ware companies keep developing soft-ware for only manufacturing, finance,sales, HR, and other functions of organ-izations? Is it not high time we startedlooking at automating the software de-velopment assembly line? I know thatwe don’t use the term ‘assembly line’ todescribe the software developmentprocess - SDLC (Software Develop-ment Life Cycle) is a generally acceptedterm in the industry. Perhaps this is thereason why not much importance isgiven to automating the SDLCprocesses by the IT process owners orthe Software Engineering ProcessGroups (popularly known as SEPG) inIT services companies. Perhaps we nowhave to start referring to SDLC as Soft-ware Assembly Line and treat it as such.

Over the years, many models ofSDLC have been evolved, starting withthe linear or waterfall model to more re-cent agile models. Agile developmentalso has many flavors like SCRUM, Ex-treme Programming, TDD (Test DrivenDevelopment), and so on. Iterative, Spi-

ral, Incremental, Prototype, Joint Appli-cation Development (JAD), and Foun-tain Model are some of the othercommonly used SDLC models. Not tomention the other ‘technology specific’models introduced by Technology ven-dors like RUP, MSF, and ASAP, whichI will not get into. If we consider theWaterfall and Agile models as the ex-tremes – the former being extremelyrigid and the latter being extremely flex-ible – all other models fall somewherein between.

While each model has its ownstrengths and weaknesses and benefitsand pitfalls, a closer examination indi-cates a few essentials in the SDLC andits many variations. The essentials arePlanning, Analysis, Design, Develop-ment, Testing, and Deployment. Thevariations depend on the weightage orimportance given to the essentials,whether they are done in a sequence orin parallel or iterations, the processes -the ways the essentials are carried outand the role of various participants andstakeholders.

So, what does it take to create a soft-ware assembly line from the existingSDLC? No, I am not suggesting anothernew model. Follow the model(s) youare most comfortable with and applythese 3 key mantras – reuse, automate,and integrate.

ReuseWhat can we reuse in software devel-opment? Many of you will immediatelythink of ‘code libraries that we devel-oped in earlier projects’. You are ab-solutely right; but not completely right.Reuse does not pertain only to coding.Remember, regardless of the SDLCmodel you choose, coding is only oneof the essentials in the SDLC. Okay, sowhat else can we reuse? Everything; letme go ahead and list some of them:

� Planning – estimation techniques,project plans, schedules, workbreakdown, and so on.

� Analysis – Use cases, diagramsand pictorial representations, ques-tionnaire templates, data collectionsheets, and so on.

� Design – Architectures, designstandards, DB designs, DB struc-tures and objects, UI designs andtemplates, business classes, and soon.

� Development – Reusable compo-nent libraries, ‘how to’ code snip-pets, validation classes, genericapplication blocks, and so on.

� Testing – Test cases and scenarios,Test plans, and so on.

� Deployment – installation proce-dures, deployment kits, deploy-ment guidelines, and so on.

Software for SSooffttwwaarree DDeevveellooppmmeennttLLiiffee CCyyccllee

TTeecchhnnoollooggyy:: By Mahesh S. PrabhuThe author is Microsoft Technology Practice Head, ITC Infotech

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Computer games now rivalfilms as the greatestrevenue generator in theentertainment industry,but games are being used

for many more things thanentertainment. ‘Serious games’ are beingused for everything from corporatetraining to cancer recovery. Not only arethese games and the companies behindthem working to change the world forthe better, but they’re becoming bigbusiness too.

What comes to mind when you thinkof video games? The high poweredconsoles like the Nintendo Wii or SonyPlaystation, big budget games like Callof Duty, and the relatively young fansthat buy them. It’s clear that video gamesare a serious business, and have been sofor some time: in the UK alone, £1.73billion was spent on video games duringa 12 month period ending in September2009 - £500 million more than onmovies and purchase of DVDs duringthe same period. But the video gameindustry is much, much more thanGrand Theft Auto and World ofWarcraft. As the industry has grown,‘serious games’ or games developed fora purpose beyond pure entertainmenthave proliferated as well.

Serious games, which have beendeveloped for uses ranging fromcorporate training to cancer recovery,can take advantage of the sameproperties that make entertainmentgames so addictive: strong engagementduring interactive play, motivation toimprove and win, and the ability tosimulate compelling situations. Butinstead of using these elements to simplydrive game sales, serious games usethem to teach, persuade, or facilitatepersonal improvement. Forexample,Food Force, a game publishedby the United Nations World FoodProgram, was developed to educateindividuals about the mission and workof the WFP. Even Wii Fit, a hugelysuccessful exercise game, fits squarelyin this category: the primary motivationfor people purchasing the game is toimprove their physical fitness.

Wii Fit also serves as proof thatgames for personal improvement can behugely profitable; it’s a significantcontributor to a serious game market thatis estimated to generate more than $1.5billion in revenues worldwide each year.Games like Wii Fit, FoodForce, and Celebrity Calamity, afinancial literacy game developed by aprofessor and dean at Harvard Business

School, are also examples of what manyin the serious games industry refer to as‘games for good’. Whether it’simproving fitness, culturalunderstanding, or budgeting skills, thesegames help people the world over to livehealthier, safer, and happier lives.

And governments and institutionsaround the world are starting to takenote. The same leaders who oncecondemned video games for keepingkids indoors and being too violent arenow promoting and funding games forgood as incredibly powerful tools forlarge-scale social change and personalimprovement. In the United States,President Barack Obama announced amajor initiative in November 2009 touse gaming technology to improve mathand science education for students. Morerecently, the Educational Secretary ofScotland, citing new research findingssupporting learning games in education,encouraged the use of brain traininggames in Scottish schools. Otherresearch, such as the 2006 ACTIVEstudy published in the Journal of theAmerican Medical Association, showthat this sort of healthy games can helpa much larger population, includingseniors and middle aged individuals,improve their cognitive fitness as well.

Games are even helping cancer patientsspeed their recovery. A study in thejournal Pediatrics found that cancerpatients who playedRe-Mission, a gamedeveloped by the California based non-profit HopeLab, maintained higherlevels of chemotherapy in their bloodand took their antibiotics moreconsistently.

It’s exactly this sort of landmarkresearch, which supports the use ofgames for good in a wide variety ofcontexts that has motivated a newgeneration of entrepreneurs to begincompanies in the serious games space.Virtual Heroes, a serious gamedevelopment company in NorthCarolina, has teamed up with HopeLabto build the next version of Re-Mission and has created a variety ofother healthy and educational games.Other companies, such as FilamentGames in Wisconsin and Red Hill

Studios in California, are developingeducational and healthy games inconjunction with US Supreme Courtjudgments, PBS, and universities aroundthe world.

Not only are the companies craftingthese games helping people in diversecontexts, but they’re discovering thatbuilding games for good can be lucrativebusiness as well. Our company,lumosity.com, has been fortunate to beat the center of the explosion of demandfor games that promote better brainhealth. SharpBrains, which conductsmarket research within the brain fitnessindustry, reports that brain traininggames generated $265 million inrevenues in 2008, and may reach asmuch as $5 billion by 2015. Just asmany healthy game developers, like thecreators of Re-Mission, have hadpersonal experiences with their lovedones being affected by the conditionsthey’ve created in the games, myfounders and myself all have familymembers affected by the devastatingimpact of cognitive decline. Like othermajor players in the healthy games spacewe’ve grounded our work in existingresearch, as well as in our ongoingcollaborations with Stanford, UCSF, and

the University of Michigan. We feeltruly lucky to be able to use this researchto help the over 3 million monthlyunique visitors to lumosity.com, thelargest online destination for healthygames, work towards better cognitivefitness.

Key indicators point to the continuedgrowth of the games for good sector inthe immediate future and in the longterm as well. In India, venture capitalfirms have made significant investmentsin learning game companies such asHurix Systems. The popularity ofexercise games such as Wii Fit and EASports Active, which sold over 600,000units in its first two weeks of availability,mean that continued development in thisspace is all but assured. In fact, EAannounced an expansion to its exercisegame almost immediately after itsrelease. As long as new applications forgames are explored, we can expect themarket for games for good to continueto expand. As it does, smart players inthe space will continue to realizerevenues that will make up anincreasingly significant portion of thegame market - all while helping peoplearound the world live smarter, healthier,happier lives. si

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TTeecchhnnoollooggyy:: By Kunal SarkarThe author is CEO, LumosLabs

Serious games, which have been developed foruses ranging from corporate training to cancerrecovery, take advantage of the same propertiesthat make entertainment games so addictive


Several domestic (USbased) groups have starteddifferentiating themselvesand are competing suc-cessfully with offshore

outfits on the strength of agile devel-opment. You keep hearing ‘fastertime-to–market’, ‘balance betweenno process and too much process’,and ‘quick ROI’. Granted that Agileand SCRUM are not new – unlikecloud computing, not even like virtu-alization. But agile offshore develop-ment is yet to become mainstream.

As a person who knows justenough about software developmentto be dangerous, I have found the ideaof short sprints and frequent deliver-ies appealing. The idea of tacklingfeatures that deliver most businessvalue early in the project soundsgreat. This seems to be the perfectrecipe for improving customer satis-faction and retention.

My company has been doing off-shore development for close to 25

years. We pride ourselves as beingISO 9000 and CMM compliant. Ourquality system includes several life-cycle models starting from thedreaded Waterfall to Modular Water-fall to Spiral. Surely, adding SCRUMto this must be a breeze. I have reli-giously chanted Agile and SCRUM inmany of my meetings with projectmanagers. But I have found severalchallenges:

�� I have already been doing it foryearsWe often confuse intermediatedeliverables with agile develop-ment. Intermediate deliveries areoften sequenced based on ease ofconstruction and not on businessvalue. The sole purpose is todemonstrate progress and, moreoften than not, to get paid.

�� If it ain’t broke, don’t fix itRequirements documents, usecases, and low level design docu-ments are ingrained in the sys-

tem; these are the elementsaround which companies such asours have gained a reputation ofconsistency and high quality.They have served us well. Projectteams are horrified at any sug-gestion to dispense with some ofthem in the name of ‘just enoughdocumentation’.

�� It does not make economicsenseFrequent releases that are fit fordeployment require expensivetest automation tools. Effectivecollaboration with distributedteams (onsite, offshore, andproduct owner) requires toolsas well. Tools that are afford-able for people who cost $100per hour are not affordable forthose who cost $25 per hour.

�� Offshore is designed for scale,not autonomyRelatively inexperienced (butsmart, hard working, and eagerto learn) engineers form the

backbone of offshore organiza-tions. Scalability centersaround the ability to assemblehundreds of such people with acommand-and-control super-structure made up of experi-enced project leaders andmanagers.

Thankfully, the industry hastaken some (baby) steps towardsadopting agile methodology for off-shore development. Lessons havebeen learnt and best practices areemerging. Here are some examples:�� Part of the analysis and design

must be done by offshoreteams. Do not perform all up-stream tasks onsite and just dothe heavy-lifting offshore.

�� Consciously work towards em-powering developers andtesters. Move away from sen-iors making all the decisions.This is a major cultural changethat requires training and set-ting expectations.

�� Choose tools and interactionmechanisms that are suited fordistributed teams working indifferent time zones. Interest-ingly, this might mean moredocuments. But adaptation isnecessary to make meetingsshort and effective.In short, agile offshore might not

be mainstream yet, but we are mov-ing in the right direction from aprocess perspective.

I also find the agile methodologyfascinating in the context of a seem-ing paradox: Customer satisfactionis higher in time and material en-gagements than in fixed price en-gagements. This situation makessense from a vendor perspective, butwhy would it apply to customers? Ihave been a vendor all my life andputting me in a customer’s shoes isoutside the sphere of my compe-tence. The only explanation I cancome up with is that customers pay

a lot more attention to time and ma-terial projects - a critical successfactor in most software developmentprojects. Agile methodology implieshigher level of customer involve-ment. It is exactly what a good doc-tor will prescribe. However, myproject managers will consider mebrain-dead if I even used agile andfixed bid in the same section, leavealone right next to each other as in‘agile fixed bid project’. Bear inmind that fixed bids are more com-mon in the offshore context. In my

world, onsite fixed bid is as much asan oxymoron as agile offshore is.Therefore, reconciling the conflictbetween agility and the desire forfixed scope and price contracts iscritical to adopt agile model for off-shore engagements.

In most enterprises (as opposedto software development organiza-tions) the need for, and appreciationof agile software development doesnot percolate beyond IT. �� Business sponsors want to know

what they are paying for. �� Users do not want frequent re-

leases. �� Most of the projects involve mi-

gration from an existing appli-cation. It is a crime to leave outfeatures, however unimportantthey might be. You will neverknow if someone in a remotecorner is dependent on that fea-ture and the work will come to agrinding halt without it.

As a result, agile methodologydoes not seem to be applicable tomost enterprise engagements. But Iforesee this changing. Any reason-able size project is too complex forBRUF (big requirements up front)or BDUF (big design up front). It istime to find a middle ground be-tween the ‘take all risks away fromme’ fixed price model and ‘give mea team and I will manage them’ timeand material model. How about afixed price, fixed schedule, ‘fitted’scope engagement?

I believe agile model has the po-tential to dramatically improve cus-tomer satisfaction levels in offshoreengagements. Here is a call for:

�� Project teams to leave theircomfort zone founded on elabo-rate processes and documenta-tion, and

�� Customers to inject a little moretrust and flexibility into theircontracts. si

Agile OffshoreOxymoron?

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TTeecchhnnoollooggyy:: By V. KannanThe author is Joint Managing Director & CEO, SRA Systems

The latest study report “Indian Managed IT ServicesMarket" by Springboard

Research forecasts that the ITmanaged services market inIndia will grow from $1.6

billion in 2009 to $3.8 billionin 2013. About 66 percentCIOs surveyed are planningto adopt and engage with amanaged services modelrather than strategic outsourcing due to

perceptions of "convenience"with managed services.

different light. “I call IT an enabler forenablers. Every company has certainenablers and at Honeywell we havethree enablers — Functional Transfor-mation, Velocity Product Develop-ment (VPD™) and HoneywellOperations Systems (HOS). So posi-tioning projects which achieve these

business goals is probably where weneed to do our investing. When we in-stalled a high performance computingcluster costing several millions for oneof our business units we were able toreduce the production time by 30 per-cent. To me such an investment is jus-tified,” tells Iyer. It is this kind ofspecification CIOs are looking todayto make their business decisions.

At present his prime focus hasbeen bringing all the processes on asingle ERP platform across all busi-ness verticals so as to increase the or-ganization’s efficiency. “We arecontinuing the journey in what we callFunctional Transformation that ishelping the company save tremen-dously. If one looks at all the supportfunctions in Honeywell, we have cutdown our costs by half but at the sametime improved efficiencies,” says Iyer.Also being a multi-billion dollar com-pany that services several industries, itis important that it work on a commonplatform and hence it has set up theinitiatives like HOS and the ERP sys-tems it deployed have been huge en-ablers.

What excites Iyer when he looks atproduct development is the whole ap-proach of how to invent, innovate cre-ate products, develop a flawlessproduct launch and then manufactureand bring in productivity, that is anarea ripe for IT and automation oppor-tunities. “We have done a lot of workin that segment and we dabble in there.Once we start tapping opportunities toimprove Product Lifecycle we willhave a goldmine of opportunities tomake the most of. In the area of cus-tomer relationship management, weare dabbling few other businesses, weare looking at launching an initiativeto bring CRM globally just like ourERP system,” he explains. These aretwo areas Iyer feels the need to ex-plore.

A believer in teamwork, Iyer fol-lows an easy to approach relationshipwith his team. His mantra to keep his

team and himself motivated wassomething that he learned from hischairman — “Yesterday’s newswraps today’s fish”. Iyer constantlytells his team that what they did yes-terday was good but today is a newday so it is important to get a jump-start. Fad-free management withsense of humor and direct approachis hisstyle of leadership.

He attributes his successful man-agement skills to playing Cricket inschool days. “This taught me the im-portance of strategy and teamwork.”Also he believes that his days in col-lege have had a large impact in shap-ing his career. “For my graduation, Icould not get into any of the top col-leges and the one which I attended wasa public college and very rough. But ittaught me a lot of street smarts. I be-lieve that if one wants to survive inthis competitive world he would needmany other skills than just good edu-cation and intellectual superiority. Youneed to know to tackle people of allkinds and this requires street smartselse you will get hurt,” he says.

From his wide cross industry ex-perience, that includes leadership po-sitions in GlaxoSmithKline Beecham,Johnson & Johnson, CTS, Honeywellin Asia Pacific and more, he has manythoughts that he wants to share withentrepreneurs. According to him, start-ups need to look at Cloud Computingvery seriously as he thinks it will en-able software developers very well.Also another area to focus is continu-ing globalization with help of cloudcomputing. One need not have datacenters in specific regions rather allthe outsourcing and monitoring can bedone from remote locations via Cloud.He also advises them to jumpstart atmobile technology especially inemerging region India and Chinawhere this is more pervasive. Theyought to target the enterprises and con-sumers with mobile apps and other re-lated technologies. For Iyer these arewhat will form the next frontier. si

si l i con ind ia |43|M a y 2 0 1 0s i l i con ind ia |42|M a y 2 0 1 0

Bask Iyer is excited fortimes ahead. As the CIOof the $35 billion corpo-ration, Honeywell, he islooking at making the

maximum of what is in store — mo-bile computing and cloud computing.He bets that these are the next bigthing to revolutionize the industry afew years down the road. “As a CIO,my primary task is to keep the tech-nology trends in line with the com-pany’s business and I see a lot ofpotential in the convergence of mobileand cloud computing for both internalpractices of the company as well as forclients by opening avenues for newproducts,” he says.

From scaling up infrastructure toproviding services on-the-go there is alot one can offer with these new tech-nology advancements. As for Honey-well, Iyer is looking forward to beingable to service business which werenot in their client radar earlier. “Due tocost constraints, specifically capital in-vestments, some of our potential cus-tomers may not have been able to useour products and services but withcloud computing the scenario is boundto change. They can now deploy oursoftware over Cloud and SaaS makingit is cost effective,” he says.

Another trend that he sees catchingon like wildfire is the adoption ofOpen Source technology. He believesthere are many interesting productsfrom Operating Systems to databases

and apps in open source platform. Hefinds them very good cost and qualitywise for both small and large products.Iyer has also been observing many fel-low CIOs who have seen the need tobreakaway from legacy software andapplications.

In his current role, Iyer is respon-sible for increasing productivity andimproving the effectiveness of Honey-well’s IT, while safeguarding Honey-well’s critical information, intellectualproperty, and physical resources. Healso implements an effective globaloperating service model by deployingnew technology platforms and the coretools necessary to drive Honeywell’sbusinesses and strengthen IT’s role asa critical business partner throughoutthe company. In addition, he also leadsthe Honeywell IT Council, which setsthe direction and focus for the func-tion.

Despite all the change happeningaround, Iyer is focused enough not toignore the fundamental buildingblocks of the company’s business.Honeywell has been doing cuttingedge technology work in multiplefields and Iyer plans to align the newdevelopments to enable company’s ex-isting business processes. “What wewant to do in terms of convergence oftechnologies is give our scientists andengineers the tools that will help gettheir job done efficiently,” he explains.Exemplifying his statement Iyer talksabout new tools such as high perform-

ance computing clusters, super com-puters, virtualization of labs by remotetechnology access and more.

While Iyer finds these changingtimes exciting he also feels that thesein turn have also become the majorchallenge for most CIOs. The rate oftechnology change has been dramaticand while a few like Iyer are excited,most executives find this roller coasterride ‘scary’, wondering about what isin store tomorrow. The challenge is tokeep one’s business up to date with thechanges and in some cases try and bepioneers in bringing about the wave ofchange. But Iyer believes that forthose who have a passion for it thereis nothing that will stop them in suc-ceeding in these times. “One just hasto have the discipline to go throughprocess and change management totake a large company forward andkeep in line with the advancements.This means you have to take a fewswings and risks. As a CIO if I want tostay afloat then I have to think like anentrepreneur and take a few risks hereand there,” says Iyer.

The kind of process Iyer has setabout in the past few years at Honey-well is a testament of his modern dayapproach and support of new tech-nologies to improve the company’sbusiness while keeping intact the com-pany’s core processes. From a timewhen ROI only meant cost contain-ment or cost avoidance, Iyer feelsCIOs have matured to look at it in a

CCIIOO PPrrooffiillee:: By Vimali Swamy

THE NEXT FRONTIERCloud & Mobile Computing

Bask Iyer

ere is a lot of potential in the convergence of mobile and cloudcomputing for bothinternal practices ofthe company as wellas for clients byopening avenues fornew products


siTech20

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Stock PriceINR Closing28.04.2010

52 WeekHIGH

52 WeekLOW

% CHANGE IN PRICE4 Weeks 52 Weeks

CAPITALIZATIONIn Rs. Crore

INDIA INDEXIndex of the top tech public companies in India

Infosys TechnologiesTata Consultancy ServicesWipro LtdHCL TechnologiesMphasis Mahindra Satyam Tech MahindraPatni CompFinancial TechnologiesGTL LtdRolta IndiaHCL InfosystemsMindtreeCMC LtdPolaris SoftwareMoser BaerNIIT LtdSonata SoftwareSasken Communications TechnologySubex Systems

2698770691386661907705491525403186130640136118173695820563

207094363935273229986051018953432061896411320181115783516296

1040358197871386205943821873263181257254014133519

-3-7-441-6-15-3-6-15-4314-215-4182

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15501215094110117426194138721062194197086702038703000284725142060179012261138611556365

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RANK COMPANY

Stock Price(US$)Closing04.28.2010

52 WeekHIGH

52 WeekLOW

% CHANGE IN PRICE4 Weeks 52 Weeks

CAPITALIZATIONIn $ Millions

U.S INDEXIndex of the top tech public companies in U.S foundedand managed by Indians

Cognizant Tech. Juniper NetworksSanDisk CorporationMicrochip TechQlogic CorporationTibco SoftwareSyntelCavium NetworksAruba NetworksInfinera CorporationNetezzaIsilon SystemsiGateIxiaNetScoutSycamore NetworksOSI SystemsEXL Service holdings Magma DesignKeynote Systems

512942302111372913101413121015202616412

4929323021105025121112711816373319312

1712820941782652246214617

0-520457-5204175562364-1-12-9361

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OSISEXLSLAVAKEYN

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