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Contents: August 2011 Page 22

cover

story

the

Creating
Experience By Hari Anil
[Startup City] 40
How to Build a World Class Technology Company in India? By Vimali Swamy
Sanjay Shelvankar

[Guru Talk] 8 [In Focus] 10 [VC Talk] 16

Nilesh Gupta

Add More Value to your Customers! By Nilesh Gupta iPrimitus Consultancy Services

Social Media in Banking: Ten Business imperatives for Banks By Ramana Venkata Udathu, Infosys

[Business] 44

Android Camp 2011:Throwing Light on New Arenas of Android By Divya Srinivasa Managing Superior Performance: Your CEO can make the difference! By Ajith Kumar B Global Human Resources, UST Global

55

[Entrepreneurship] 56

[Tech Buzz] 14
3 Keys to a Successful Startup: Engage Build Sell By Nandini Hirianniah, The Morpheus U.S. and India: Key Investment Opportunities By Shrikant Lohokare, E-Cubed Ventures

[Technology] 42

Automation A Panacea for all Testing Problems By Bhanu Prakash B G, Collabera

[People Manager] 58 [Tech Products] 60 [Event] 62

[Event] 47

Attrition Blues: Myth & Reality By C. Mahalingam, Symphony Services

18

CIO brainstorming and IT Strategies explained in Chennai By Akanksha Ravindran Is your organization spending too much money building IT systems ? By Digant Shah, Fulcrum Worldwide

[Business] 48

Set the BUG Right @ SofTec 2011 Bangalore By Nushin Naz

[Venture Beat] 20

Anytime Retail.com:Fair Price, Fair Deal By Hari Anil Smart Mobile Ecosystem for Entrepreneurs By ST Team

[Company Spotlight] 34

[Technology] 50

10

Most Promising

26

[Feature] 35

Mobility: Redefining the Financial Marketplace By Venkat Rangan, MarketSimplified

[Buyers Perspective ] 52 53

[Business] 36

Bridging the Gap Between Academia & Industry There beats a Heart of Dragon within every Smart Device

Copyright Registration:Is It Required? By Anita Kalia, Oriigin IP Solutions The Latest Trends in Enterprise Resource Planning By Vinay Singh, Vital Wires Consulting
The Smart Techie

[Technology] 38

[Event] 54

Define-Develop-Deploy web ideas!!! @ SiliconIndia WebApps Conference 2011 By Mohammad Faiz Ali

Adatrix CampPro Commodity Trading & Risk Management solution Customer Relationship Management - Education Dynamic Virtual Desktop Fiorano SOA HireMantra Mantle Banking Suite Verity VuNow

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August 2011

Add more

Author is & Managing Director, iPrimitus Consultancy Services

GURU TALK

By Nilesh Gupta

oanrad Hilton at one of the meeting was once asked, what was the most important lesson you've learned in your long and distinguished career? His immediate answer was to tuck the shower curtain inside the bathtub. It doesnt matter, what or where the lesson is, but the value-add it brings to the table, is more important today! In my last two decades of IT services experience, many times, while working with customers, vendors often quote this we will meet or exceed the expectations, least they know that it is not just the expectations, its right expectations that need to be delivered. If I have to quote an example in laymans words, if the current situation is being a warm soda, so as a provider you work to make it cold and exceed the expectations. So what if the market does not require a soda but need a flavored soda instead? Even though, the customers expectations have met, its no use to him! A strategy needs to be born, born to explore the boundaries beyond the needs, but to make use of change to make use of it, not just meet it! In the world that we work today, business results are still controlled by the three reactors, Technology, Processes and People. How do we catalyze the change, enable innovation and establish a world without boundaries that provides high quality inputs to the decisions the CxO make. In the last twenty odd years, there has
The Smart Techie

to your customers!

Value
been more than 1000 percent growth in Information Technology (IT), from banks to retail chains, telecoms to aerospace, the rise and fall of dotcoms or how the financial markets played musical chair since Sep 08. We have seen a 150-year-old company failing, a company with market value of more than billions, being sold over for less than 1/100 of the price. Again, not moving away from the topic, value-add, and strategy to offer becomes even more important working around costly staffing, storage sprawl, isolated tools and environments or disconnected messaging systems that become extremely inflexible and more challenging to endcustomers today. The answer we look for is the sweet spot amongst the customer needs, the organization capability and what a provider that can
Nilesh Gupta

strategy and needs to be continuously reviewed and reinforced during the on-going sourcing life cycle. A sound governance model should also allow the offshore service provider to deal with short time frames, manage resources according to any changes in the project planning, and ensure that the necessary skills and technical capabilities are made available to the service recipient during the life of the relationship. Ultimately, customer satisfaction is only the run-of-the-mill entry point. It is the degree to which customers perceive their rational needs are being met and the relative value

CIO/CFO are the agents of business, taking growth from one to another level, from want of technology to spend on it, comes hand-in-hand.
making the internal changes at customer end and hence become more agile. As per report from Forrester, in a non-outsourced environment managements operational time spend is about 75 percent, and when this is partnered/outsourced it moves to about 30 percent, this also means that the customer is willing to part their day-to-day IT work to its partner and expect trust and loyalty in return. As companies become increasingly commoditized keeping and expanding vendor-customer relationships depends on their ability to create loyalty programs by delivering a customer experience tailored to changing customer needs. Today there are relationship manager role that had come forward over period of time to act liaison between the customer and the delivery teams. It has become one of the keys to success in acquiring and retention of customers trust and loyalty. The role created is not to cater to the needs of the customer post sale, but even before the beginning of the pitch in the sale cycle. There are Tier-1 IT companies who claim to be customer-centric and I truly believe in what they say, but over a period of time, the customer and centric drift apart. Talking to various CxO in the past, most of them had similar feedback or so; the simple reason being Know Your Customer (KYC) is no longer in play. There could be many reasons for the same, but personally I feel that customers are growing in a more diverse and specialized manner with the needs of the market changes and requirements, and they expect providers to understand their changing needs and interests and cater to those needs. In the past, corporate floors had questions like, how do we keep customers from going away from us? which has now become, how do we want them to want us more? The fact is that all customers are not equal in society, which means they are differences in businesses, size, goals etc. and hence being customer centric becomes even more challenging in nature. This does not mean that every provider needs to build loyalty and improve retention by doing everything for every one all the time. It just means that, providers must understand the customer experiences, cater to specific business goals and interests and value their on-going interest in providers. To survive and even thrive is one thing, but growing from here is another. Today, CIO/CFO are the agents of business, taking growth from one to another level, from want of technology to spend on it, comes hand-in-hand. The conditions today that will drive increased business and IT collaboration will depend on the business that will drive the technology in the organization. But in the end what still matters is at what value.
The Smart Techie

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offer the value-add. If we go by the books, its straightforward - reduce or eliminate cost / raise or create value. If it were that simple, we wouldnt need half the masterminds today. So how do we create value-add through strategic outsourcing/partnering? Strategic sourcing is not just about outsourcing business or IT services. A main task when designing a sourcing strategy is to monitor the needs of each business unit and clearly identify the enterprise's strategic goals with yours. The Governance model as per Gartner - it is the sum of management capabilities, methods and processes, organizational roles and responsibilities, and rules and agreements that support the dynamic delivery of services in a mixed (internal and external) environment. I truly believe that Governance is a key aspect of the sourcing

to them of what is delivered. Increase customers response rates time to customer and Service levels and the two most important bonds in the retention of customers in the IT services Industry. By creating historical statistics by analyst, including graphing of raw data and customer comments and feedback, it becomes important to benchmark the performance of your work against established goals. These measures will not only result in analyzing the various satisfaction positions from time to time, but also help you to understand the need of customer as you grow along with them. As a provider, your value propositions must meet the customer need to understand the external effects over a period of time, while

August 2011

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August 2011

in
Majority of Recruiters Anticipate New Jobs to be created: Naukri Survey
The Naukri Hiring Outlook survey is conducted twice a year to gauge the hiring trends across sectors. This gives a clear perspective about the employment opportunities in the market and throws light on increments, job opportunities and attrition levels. The overall sentiment shows that hiring activity will continue to move at a brisk pace over the next six months. The trend for the current survey is in line with the sentiment expressed six months back. Attrition has always been an area of concern for recruiters and the survey result also pointed the same. About 20 percent of the recruiters who took part in it said that attrition levels in their organization are above 20 percent, while 60 percent said it is below 10 percent in their

in
India at 14th position in 2010 FDI inflow index

team of researchers in the Rice University, led by an Indian origin scientist, has packaged lithium ion batteries, which power mobiles and smartphones, into a single nanowire. This discovery could be of immense value for new generations of nanoelectronics, as this can substitute as a valuable power source. Pulickel M. Ajayan, who did his B. Tech in metallurgical engineering from Banaras Hindu University in 1985, India and Ph.D. from Northwestern University US in 1989, had been inching towards single nanowire devices for years. The team first reported the creation of

Indian Origin Scientist Led Team Designs Nanosized Batteries

survey conducted by Naukri.com, the flagship brand of Info Edge, revealed an optimistic hiring scenario in the second half of 2011. The survey took the opinion of more than 950 recruiters across India. 78 percent of the recruiters predicted addition of new jobs and only 2 percent anticipate layoffs. Employers began recruiting at a steady pace in the first half of 2011 and confidence levels were high. The survey findings indicate sustainable new job opportunities in the remainder of the year and job seekers can look forward to a favorable hiring environment. However trend, as always will be indexed to growth and business confidence levels, says Ambarish Raghuvanshi, Chief Financial Officer, Info Edge.

organization. When it comes to increments, 32 percent of the recruiters surveyed said that the range of increments was between 10 percent and 15 percent and another 31 percent registered the range was between 15 percent and 20 percent. When it comes to experience levels will they witness maximum hiring, 60 percent of recruiters said 4-8years, 50 percent recruiters said that it would be within 1- 3 years, 22 percent of them opted for 8-15 years and 20 percent said that jobs would be created for freshers. 61 percent of recruiters who took the survey said that they face a talent crunch during hiring their employees. Among these recruiters, 41 percent said that maximum talent crunch was witnessed in the 4-8years experience bracket.

ndia slipped 10 positions on the list of countries attracting the highest foreign direct investment (FDI) and fell to 14th position in the 2010 list. India ranked fourth on the list of top 10 recipients and sources of FDI inflows in developing Asia in 2009 and 2010 behind China and Singapore. FDI in India declined to $25 billion as against $36 billion last year, according to a UN survey. The list is headed by U.S. with $228 billion, second comes China with $106 billionThe U.S tops the list of countries with overseas fund inflows at $228 billion, followed by the Chinese mainland, which attracted inflows of $106 billion, and Hong Kong at $69 billion. Belgium was the fourth largest FDI inflow destination at $62 billion.

According to the UNCTAD's annual investment survey, World Investment Report 2011, the FDI to South Asia declined to $32 billion, reflecting a 31 percent slide in inflows to India and a 14 percent drop in flows to Pakistan. In contrast to this, inflows to Bangladesh increased by nearly 30 percent to $913 million. The desire to invest in India is still there but we need to put in a system to ensure that the deal that is given will stand for some time, said Biswajit Dhar, director general, Research and Information System for Developing Countries. As a result of a number of major global acquisitions by Indian companies in the period between 2007 and 2011, India is the fifth largest source of funds (FDI outflow) in developing

Asia. Among the major buyouts that figured in the UN report was Tata Steel's acquisition of UK based Corus group worth $11.8 billion and Hindalco Industries's acquisition of U.S. firm Novelis worth $5.8 billion. Tata Motors also acquired UK-based Jaguar Cars for $2.3 billion, Essar Steel Holdings bought Canada's Algoma Steel for $1.6 billion and United Spirits acquired Whyte & Mackay of UK for $1.17 billion. The report also said that global FDI investment inflows rose 5 percent to $1.24 trillion in 2010. However, it added that FDI flows at the end of the year were over 15 percent below their pre-crisis average and nearly 37 percent below their peak in 2007.

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3D nano batteries last December. "The idea here is to fabricate nanowire energy storage devices

Pulickel M. Ajayan

with ultrathin separation between the electrodes," says Arava Leela Mohana Reddy, study co-author and research scientist. The team's experimental batteries are about 50 micrometres tall, as thick as a human hair, and almost invisible when viewed edge-on. Theoretically, the nanowire energy storage devices can be as long and as wide as the templates allow, which makes them scalable. Although the nanowire devices show good capacity the researchers are fine-tuning the materials to increase their ability to repeatedly charge and discharge, which now drops off after about 20 cycles.

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in
Indian Americans seek Obamas intervention on dual tax policy

in
Indian Americans leaving Obama Administration
here used to be 12 Indian Americans in different departments of the Obama administration, but some of them have quit or had to be let go. Most resent person to resign is Preeta Bansal, senior policy advisor and the general counsel of the Office of Management and Budget. She has resigned her post due to the very demanding schedules. Before joining the Obama administration, she was head of the appellate practice at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom and she served as New York state solicitor general under then-Attorney General Eliot Spitzer. Bansal is the former Solicitor General of the State of New York; a previous Special Counsel in the White House and Justice Department (1993-1996); and a former law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court John Paul Stevens. Preeta considers serving under President Obama as a great privilege. She led the Obama-Biden legal transition team for six months prior to its inauguration, and was a part of the president's campaign team of outside advisers since the start of 2007. Back in January this year Anish Goel, another Indian American, senior director for South Asia in the National Security Council (NSC), a part of the Obama's administration, quit his post after a power struggle within the administration over the future direction of Indo-U.S. relations. He was among the few people who worked closely with Obama on the Indo-U.S. nuclear deal. At internal meetings he argued for a relationship with India where military strategy, strategic vi-

everal Indian American civic and professional groups have sought President Barack Obama's intervention in a joint campaign seeking relief on penalties stipulated by U.S. tax rules on foreign bank accounts. The letter to Obama by the Global Organization of People of Indian Origin (GOPIO), National Federation of Indian American Association (NFIA), American Association of Physicians of Indian Origin (AAPI) and Asian American Hotel Owners Association (AAHOA) follows a similar plea to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. The letter expresses the communitys concern that new U.S. immigrants of Indian origin are facing unfair and unprecedented penalties for failure to disclose and do tax filing of foreign bank accounts by the 31st of August. Copies of the letter

ith declining wages abroad, an increasing number of non-resident Indian IT professionals are moving back to India, says a survey. IT and IT-enabled firms in India hired 28 percent more non-resident Indian (NRI) professionals in the first quarter of 201112, according to the survey conducted by recruitment consulting firm MyHiringClub.com. Among 11 surveyed industries, IT and IT-enabled services registered highest growth, with 28 percent increase year-on-year in the first quarter of the current fiscal. It is followed by pharma and healthThe Smart Techie

NRI professionals move back to India

care, up by 20 percent, automobile and manufacturing, up by 18 percent, telecom, up by 14 percent, banking and financial services, up by 10 percent and FMCG, up by six percent. The high economic growth in India with many good opportunities has fuelled the NRI thought process to head back. In addition to that, many US companies are opening their offices in India and hiring more to target the growing market in Asia, says Rajesh Kumar, CEO of MyHiringClub.com. An increasing number of high value NRI professional recruitment is likely to

were also sent to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The joint letter affirmed the community's recognition of the necessity for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to take needed actions and enact rules to track money flowing to terrorists, drug transaction and money laundering in safe havens outside the United

States. However, the groups urged the IRS to review and reconsider the rules towards more practical and prudent application. The IRS had announced on the 8th of February this year, the voluntary disclosure initiative designed to bring offshore money back into the U.S. tax system that will be available through August. Among other things, the Indian community has requested that stipulated 25 percent Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts (FBAR) penalty on assets of law abiding citizens be eliminated and the IRS deadline for voluntary disclosure be extended to Dec 31, 2012. The groups have also asked the government to publicize the amnesty program in ethnic newspapers and other community media in multiple languages, as well through print, radio and television media interviews.

sion and diplomatic elements, including civil society initiatives, provided lead inputs. As a result to this in the re-election, Goel did not gain much popularity among the team members and the President had no choice but to let go of him.

Preeta Bansal

August August 10, 2011 Bangalore

Over the last several years, siliconindia has evolved into an authoritative platform for technology leaders. It has enabled them to share their experiences, views and ideas in the elds of technology and business. The siliconindia Leadership Summit will kick o an active dialogue amongst leaders in the Indian technology industry. This is a platform for evoking thought leadership in a global business environment. The summit is an ideal platform for today's eminent leaders to meet and inspire the leaders of tomorrow. The summit will help you strike the right chord with varied technology leaders, ones who excel at innovation, are engaged in business transformation, and are building workforces that are e cient, engaged, and e ective.

Lsummit eadership

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take place in the coming years as wage gaps have declined sharply. Increasing numbers of people are now returning because now the advantages of returning back to India outweigh the disadvantages by far, adds Kumar. The highest number of NRIs who returned home found jobs in Bangalore, followed by Mumbai, Delhi and Hyderabad. The NRI professional hiring trend survey, with participation from senior HR professionals and top management of 237 firms and 690 recruitment consultants, was conducted online between the 1st and the 15th of August.

siliconindia

Speakers :
Sameer Padhye, Senior Vice President, Cisco India & SAARC Ajay Goel, Managing Director, India & SAARC, Symantec VR Ferose, MD, SAP Labs India Vijay Anand, Vice President, Intuit India Ganesh Lakshminarayanan, Vice President and Managing Director, Dell International GBS Bindra, Global Director of Innovation, Logica

Who should attend?

CEOs Managing Directors Presidents

VPs Director

Venue
Hotel: Matthan #134, HAL Airport Road, Kodihalli, Next to Manipal Hospital Bengaluru - 560 017

August 2011

080-43112165

Compiled By Hari Anil

CASIO India, a 100 percent subsidiary of the multibillion dollar consumer electronics giant Casio Computer Co. Japan, launched mercury lamp-free, high-brightness data projectors in the country. Casio has introduced three top models of its projector series - Short Throw, Pro and Standard models. The standard model of the projector series has an ANSI lumen up to 3000 and comes with a host of technological advancements to serve to its wide range of users. The Pro-Model projector series can achieve brightness up to 3,500 ANSI lumens without a mercury lamp. This enables large screen projection in large conference rooms as well as clear projection of images in brightly lit rooms and it has 10W monaural speaker installed in it. The Short Throw series with upto 3000 lumens is equipped with a set of applications, making it ideal for classroom teaching. The Short Throw model can be equipped with a short-throw lens for projection of 60-inch images at a distance of 80 cm. All the three series are compatible with 3D contents. Our eco- friendly projectors promise to revolutionize the India market with never before features such as projection in a 3 D format as well as converting the projection screen into an electronic blackboard by mouse operations and writing on the projection screen with the optical interactive pointer to name a few, says M. Naka, Managing Director, Casio India Company. The price of the series ranges from Rs. 66,995 to Rs.1,34,995.

CASIO India Launches New Projector Series in the Country

Microsoft opened a state of the art R&D facility in the heart of Bangalores business district. This 1,54,000 square feet building will house the Bangalore Microsoft India Development Center (MSIDC) team that contributes to Microsoft Corps adCenter technologies, as well as the researchers from Microsoft Research India. Microsofts first R&D center was set up in Hyderabad in 1998, while Microsoft Research India was established in Bangalore in 2005. For the last one decade India has been a key player in Microsofts strategy of global shared development. The availability of world class talent, advanced infrastructure and proximity to the booming emerging markets of the world are key reasons behind this. The decision to set up our second R&D center in Bangalore reinforces Microsofts commitment towards India, says Qi Lu, President, Online Services Division, Microsoft Corp. Last April Microsoft had announced the extension of its engineering efforts to Bangalore as part of the Search alliance between Microsoft and Yahoo. With the com-

Microsoft Opens New R&D Facility in Bangalore

bined strength of Yahoo and Microsoft Corps Search marketplace the process of transition is now complete, and together the companies are ready to deliver greater and improved innovation for consumers, better volume and efficiency for advertisers and better monetization opportunities for web publishers. Bangalore has been our home ever since we established the Microsoft Research India lab, and moving to the new, larger lab space is indicative of the increasing interest in research in the country. The design of the space continues our quest to provide a comfortable working environment that encourages creativity and collaboration while being energy efficient and environment friendly, says P. Anandan, Distinguished Scientist and Managing Director, Microsoft Research India. Microsoft India R&D plays an important role in contributing to innovation at Microsoft. Its development team work closely with the key product families of Microsoft and, with a headcount of 3900 plus people, is one of Microsofts largest research and development centres outside Redmond.

Using its Cloud-in-a-Box demonstration tool, Intel showed technologies that will deliver a more secure, energy efficient cloud that can be deployed faster than before. Cloud computing is powered by data centres, and

Intel Demonstrates Cloud-in-a-Box

the vast majority of these data centres are powered by Intel Xeon processors. Intel provides the technologies required to build the foundation for cloud through innovations related to simplification, virtualization, security,

open standards and others. By 2015, more than 2.5 billion people with more than 15 billion devices will access the Internet; this is more than twice todays demand and internet traffic is expected to reach a zettabyte, one million million billion bytes. Intel has a multi-year vision for cloud computing called Cloud 2015. In this vision, cloud data centres should be seamlessly and securely connected or federated, should be fully automated, provisioning resources with little or no human interaction, and clouds should be client-aware, providing secure access and optimal experience across a range of devices from smartphones to powerful notebooks. To truly realize the promise of cloud computing, the company believes that open, interoperable solutions that embrace standards are essential.

According to a Gartner survey of midmarket companies, SMBs are adopting virtualization at a very aggressive pace by 2012, slightly more than 75 percent is expected to have server virtualization in wide use. In the lights of this VMware, a global leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure, unveiled the VMware vSphere Storage Appliance, a new software product that will bring the rich business continuity and automated resource management capabilities of VMware vSphere to small and midsized businesses (SMBs) without the cost and complexity of shared storage. The company also announced a com-

vSphere 5 and Comprehensive Cloud Infrastructure Suite from VMware

prehensive cloud infrastructure suite, including the release of VMware vSphere 5, a significant update to VMware vSphere. With vSphere 5 and our cloud infrastructure suite, VMware is helping customers accelerate towards more efficient and automated cloud infrastructure, redefining how resources are managed and secured, and ultimately, driving a more productive relationship between IT and the businesses they serve, says Paul Maritz, CEO, VMware. Until now, customers wanting to leverage the rich high availability and automated resource management functionality enabled by VMware vSpheres resource pooling capabilities needed sep-

arate shared storage hardware, which presented a cost and complexity barrier for some SMBs. The new VMware vSphere Storage Appliance will transform server internal storage into shared pools of storage, removing the shared storage hardware requirement and enabling more SMBs to take full advantage of the unique business continuity and automation capabilities of VMware vSphere, including High Availability, vMotion, and Distributed Resource Scheduler. The vSphere Storage Appliance will be very simple to install and configure, eliminating the need for specialized storage skills, thus bringing high application availability to SMBs with just a few mouse clicks.

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August 2011

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August 2011

The author is Co-Founder, The Morpheus

VC TALK

By Nandini Hirianniah

ITERATE LEARN GROW

3
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KEYS TO A SUCCESSFUL STARTUP: ENGAGE-BUILD-SELL

A startup should not spend anytime in things that do not impact its end customers, as getting their attention and making an impact early is important.
The Smart Techie August 2011

Engage: It is important to engage

hoosing what to focus on after getting started can be rather confusing for the startup founders. In most cases founders lose out on crucial time, right after starting, by focusing on wrong things like fund-raising, team building, deep market research, building a fully functional product as their first release to go public! When a startup gets started, it should have four things: 1. A founding team (or a founder ) committed to making things work against all odds 2. An important problem that impacts a significant set of customers, and hypothesis for the potential solution(s) that needs to be proven right or wrong 3.Have skills to hand-create solution to the problem, combined with the initial subject matter expertise in the domain they are working on 4. Some basic money to survive and work on the problem / solution The above ingredients are usually a resultant of: An ah-ha moment of finding the right idea / problem to solve A natural coming together of a

What to focus on?

team which has one main goal solving the same pain-point Once the problem to solve is identified, the team should spend time in figuring out the best way to executing it. So where does one start, anyway?

When a team gets started, there are far too many things to take care of. Focusing on things that do not matter may happen unconsciously or unintentionally. The one guideline that perhaps will help in choosing one task over the other maybe in asking the question How big is the impact of the task Ill do to the lives of my potential/existing customers. This is true not just for teams that are starting out, but all startups across (even helpful for executives in large companies in prioritizing their tasks). Simply put, a startup should not spend anytime in things that do not impact its end customers / audience, as getting their attention and making an impact early is important. Broadly classified, early stage startups should focus on only three things and keep the customer in mind at all times:

with potential customers to convert strangers to friends. First, think of who these potential customers are going to be. Every section of potential customers will have an early adopter category. These are people who are quick to use a product that seems useful, quick to give feedback, are largely forgiving and have a sense of what else is there in the market in the same domain. These are also influencers who will bring other users to your product. Look for such influencers in the potential customer segment you are going after. Reaching out to them, engaging in a dialogue will help in building a community that is listening to you or giving you attention, even before the initial product is launched. How do you reach out and start a dialogue with them? Today, there are various cost-efficient or no-cost avenues of reaching out to strangers and making friends. Startup teams can simply start with their own blogs and establish their authority over the problem they are trying to solve. Social networks, micro-blogging sites and relevant online / offline forums are good start points to engaging the potential customer initially. Let the communication be focused to reach out to a few, strong followers. Do not spread thin. Its not about spamming a list of

email ids; but reaching out with your thoughts so that people who are interested will organically engage with you. A startup building efficient ways of securing servers for businesses can engage with their potential customers by organizing seminars or events that teaches people how to secure their servers by themselves or how to pick the best tools for that job. These events should be designed to give the potential customer a lot of value. This will lead to building of confidence, trust and respect about the product/brand/startup in the minds of the potential customers. But, at no point should these avenues be used to sell directly. The idea is to influence and hog larger mindshare, so that they pick you when they have to make a buying decision. Like how McDonalds is for burgers!

Build: The first version of the prod-

uct/solution that a startup will build must be something that aims to solve an important / acute problem for a specific set of small potential customers. It can be incomplete or imperfect. What is built can be a small part of the large problem the startup is trying to solve. But, it must be something that can be executed quickly and with the resources available within the startup team. Its important to build and push out to early adopters. The scope of the initial product must be narrowed down to a very myopic level. This minimum useful product must have one compelling reason for customers to use it. If its scrappy and looks alpha-like its fine (in fact the early adopters prefer it that so that they can help you polish it).

Sell: Once you have a quick and dirty version of your product ready, reach out to the customers youve engaged with and sell it to them. Here sell does not necessarily mean in exchange for money; it also means getting end customers to use your product. It is important to get as many customers to use your product to get constructive, relevant feedback to build on the next version. It is important to start selling early. To reach out to potential customers, pitch them the value proposition, sign them up to use the product / solution. The earlier a startup does this, the better, as they have real audience to validate their product and give feedback. Though there was multiple email applications, most of us flocked to get beta invites of gmail. This was because google had engaged with us and had enticed us enough for us to get wishful about the invite only gmail. Or do you remember signing up as a test user for any of the products in the market today? I am sure youll be able to relate to the value that test users like you could provide to a product thats being built. The above three things are always iterative and can work in parallel. Engage while you Build, Sell & Engage. In all building a great product is a slow, iterative and painful process. Its important to believe completely in what you are doing, when you get started, but be agile and keep an open mind to change as you go along. Focus, Engage, Build Quick, Interact, Sell, Get users, Engage, Build again, Sell again, and Repeat all.
The Smart Techie

Remember using the initial versions of the internet? Connecting the modem to a telephone line, waiting for dialtone, dialing in multiple times before it gets connected! As early internet users, we had all the patience of dialing a hundred times and endlessly waiting for pages to load only because that was the only way to connect to the internet!

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August 2011

The author is Managing Director, E-Cubed Ventures

VC TALK

By Shrikant Lohokare Ph.D

U.S. and India: Key Investment Opportunities

We focus on themes in Advanced Materials, Cleantech, Biosciences and some niche areas of Mobile Media/ IT. We track trends in these sectors but specially focus on innovations that are enablers. For example in Cleantech, Energy Storage technologies are critical to competitiveness, and volume implementation of alternate energy solutions. There is a long way to go in terms of finding an enabling energy storage solution. Innovations in batteries, capacitors, etc are particularly of interest. We are also looking at some early stage Solar PV technologies. Although, the major trend in solar is of consolidation, funding going to later stage deals etc., there is still room for innovations enabling cost efficient manufacturing, elimination of toxics in thin film PVs, etc. In Shrikant Lohokare Biosciences, there are developments in Metabolomics related with Personalized Medicine that we find interesting. We are looking at some innovations in metabolic biomarkers and drug delivery technologies for cancer treatment. In Mobile Media, the trend is clearly towards increasing adoption of tablets and smart phones over PCs. We feel that Haptics is going to be a major area of innovation and thus opportunities in this space. Opportunities for innovation always exist. My favorite example is electronics industry. Both incremental and disruptive innovations keep happening in that industry have enabled several technologies and products in related sectors. Flexible electronics and displays, haptic technologies mentioned earlier, 3D imaging, and more, are few examples with opportunities. A lot of innovation is happening in India related to IT and Software and I think that is very close to what is happening here. Where as in non-IT sectors, there is a need to more innovation. U.S. has a
August 2011

Trends and Technologies: VC Perspective

blend of innovation culture. From universities to government laboratories, technology giants of Silicon Valley or just a garage, innovation happens every where. The same did not happen in India earlier, but these trends are now on rise in India. Indian government is taking steps to prosper entrepreneurship innovation. They are looking to work with National Laboratories and Universities and that is why we see very similar kind of approach and programs that are developing in India, something that happened in U.S. 20-30 years back. The trend is not only limited to setting up venture capital firms but also incubators, accelerators, technology centers are establishing in India which will help especially in the long IT sector. I see a lot of innovation happening in the field of media IT, but comparatively less innovation is seen in the healthcare IT sector. Indian market needs it at a substantial level. One of

the companies we would like to advice and help sustain will be related to healthcare IT market as many countries do not provide healthcare insurance. There is a large section of the population which is not getting healthcare insurance and the documentation related services are not even automated. Automation in that sector is going to be more important. I believe entrepreneurs are like cholesterol good and bad. Many entrepreneurs often only consider innovation and capital. Most of the time, an innovative idea with an experienced team gets funding more easily than those with non-experienced team. Many entrepreneurs, especially those who have not enough time in the industry or who not really understand how to take technology or products to market, they cover interesting idea but lacks experience. At the same time they are not willing to go to share that with other and more experienced co-

Advice to Entrepreneurs

India Market: Focus as a VC

founders and that is where one gap can happen. That is essential because in most cases you need a sort of a committed team or a lean. In IT, one can make one or two mistakes, come back and rectify it and restart all over again. But this cannot be the case in other sectors. Take the case of solar or doing something that is more capital intensive, in bio-tech or medical devices, you dont have the luxury of making that mistake and then coming back. You can initially crunch your capital even if it comes from angel, VC and then the startup would fall through the crack. An experienced team is required that is willing to work with the entrepreneur in good as well as bad times. A co-founding team willing to put in sweat equity before capital come in, makes a big difference. Entrepreneurs especially those that are doing a startup for the first time should be willing to share equity to bring in this experience. VCs also look for a good team first and then the business idea.

Opportunities for Innovation: India and U.S.

JAVA Conference, 20th August 2011 Bangalore The world of Java has never wavered in its trajectory of relentless innovation. Java will eventually continue to grow as the most powerful, scalable, secure, and open platform for the global developer community. The SiliconIndia Java Conference is an ideal place to obtain critical skills to help you build, run and manage tomorrows software solutions. The speakers are industry practitioners, selected for their knowledge and their ability to convey that knowledge to Java developers at large. Three Tracks : Language in Framework Architecture and SOA Agile and Cloud The con rmed speakers are: 1. Anurag Gupta, Senior Architect,Yahoo 2. Raja Shankar Kolluru, Director,Technology,Sapient 3. Pravin Sonsale, Open Source and C/C++ Technology Practice Lead,Accenture 4. Rajkumar Anantharaman, Engineering Manager, Intel 5. Vasuraj Arni, Software Development Manager, Cisco 6 .Janakiram MSV, Technology Evangelist, Amazon Web Services 7. Pronam Chatterjee, Sta Systems Engineer, vFabric SME, VMware

The Smart Techie

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Meet the Senior JAVA Leaders and get practical solutions. Limited Seats Register Now at http://www.siliconindia.com/events For speaking and sponsorship opportunities write to events@siliconindia.com or call 080-43402195

SnapDeal Raises `180 Crore in Series B Funding

Compiled by ST Team

ew Delhi based Bigshoebazaar India, an online wholesaler and retailer of shoes, apparel, bags, accessories and gift items, raises 40 crore in series B round of funding. Investors include Nexus Venture Partners and Catamaran Ventures. The company is founded in September 2009 by a group of entrepreneurs including Nitin Agarwal, Manmohan Agarwal, Danish Ahmed, and Rajul Jain. Bigshoebazaar operates a hybrid online wholesale cash and carry business as well as an ecommerce website, yebhi.com, which was earlier known as bigshoe-

Bigshoebazaar raises `40 Crore in Series B Funding

Flipkart to Raise `675 Crore in PE Round

bazaar.com. Late last year, the company raised their series A funding from Nexus Venture Partners. They source their products from Brands, including Lotto, Woodland, Bata and Puma; directly or authorized agent of the brand and run their own warehousing operations to enable them to fulfill their orders completely and achieve fastest shipping. A sales team supports them to transact offline with retailers and run a parallel franchisee business, through which it has 13 franchise stores in alliance with small retailers under its own brand name. They have about five lakh-registered users with

1.5 lakh active buyers and attract 70,000 visitors daily. Bigshoebazaar began as an online shoe-store with an average of five orders a day, but currently they handle between 4,000-5,000 products each day and have expanded their verticals from shoe-store to apparel, jewellery, bags and other related products. They offer free shipping and cash on delivery along with a 30-day return policy. Shailesh Vickram Singh from Seedfund said that e-commerce in India is now getting into Tier II and III and is capitalizing by bridging the broken supply chain model.

napDeal, a group-buying portal based out of New Delhi, raises Rs. 180 crore in series B funding in a round led by Bessemer Venture Partners. The existing investors Nexus Venture Partners and Indo-US Venture Partners also participated in the funding. The company had raised $12 million in series A funding in January this year from Nexus Venture Partners and Indo-US Venture. The increase demand of the e-commerce segment and the increase in the number of registered user-base in SnapDeal, which rose from one million to eight million in just six months, grabbed the attention of the investors. The head count of the company also increased from 300 to 500 in this short span of time. SnapDeal is a product of Jasper, which is a leading marketing company in

angalore-based Flipkart Online Services is planning to raise about Rs. 675 crore in a PE round of funding from the PE firm General Atlantic Partners. The deal values Flipkart at $1 billion. Founded in 2007 by two IIT graduates, Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal, Flipkart was launched as an online book store for India. Started with just five people, it grew within two years, cracked the top 100 Indian sites and was credited for being India's largest online bookseller with over 10 million titles on offer. Today they have ventured into mobile phones, gaming consoles, electronics, music and movies as well and have increased

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their workforce to more than 1,500 employees catering over a million customers. It has offices in Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai and Kolkata. Last December, it acquired social book discovery tool weRead.com from Lulu Enterprises, a U.S.-based on-demand publishing firm. The deal facilitates India to join big giants like the U.S. and China who has billion-dollar valued internet firms. General Atlantic has earlier this year bought 0.1 percent stake in Facebook in a deal that valued the social networking website at $65 billion. Flipkart has recently raised Rs. 90 crore from Tiger Global. Currently they are transacting Rs. 27 crore per month.

Manish Khera led FINO Raises `150 Crore

lackstone Group, a PE firm, has invested 150 crore in FINO, for a minority stake. FINO is a provider of technology solutions for banks and microfinance institutions. The fund will be used for overall growth of the company and meeting longterm capital requirements. E&Y was the sole advisor for this funding. Headquartered in Mumbai, FINO was founded in 2006. It is an inventor, innovator and implementer of integrated technology solutions for institutions like Banks, Microfinance Institutions, Government entities, and Insurance companies, to enable financial inclusion environment for the micro customers. They provide complete electronic platform projects and their solutions are anchored around using biometric smart cart, hand-held devices and Micro Deposit

India. The company was founded by marketing, technology, retail and analytics professionals to address the need of high quality, cost-effective customer management for consumer brands. Kunal Bahl, CEO and Co-Founder, SnapDeal, said that they have recently launched a product 'Deals Near Me' on its website, which will provide more localized deals to the customers. Bahl manages the strategic vision, key business relationships, fundraising and growth plans for Jasper. His prior experience includes product management and business development with Microsoft's emerging markets group and at Deloitte Consulting as a consultant in the company's telecom practice in New York and Pennsylvania. The company operates in 50 cities in India and has collaboration with over

10,000 brands and retailers across various categories. In the initial phase, it was launched as retail lifestyle services, but later diversified into branded products, electronics, fashion accessories and travel.

Kunal Bahl

Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal

businesses, banks, government and investors. He began his career with ICICI Bank in 1993. During his 13 years at ICICI, he has worked in various areas including credit, government and rural banking, technology and alternate channels. For his leadership and business vision, he was conferred as the Young Global leader by World Economic Forum in March 2011. The company has more than 35 million customers and plans to Manish Khera double its customer base in the next couple of years. It has over Machines to perform field operations and 2,500 employees and about 20,000 busibiometric authentication. They raised 70 ness correspondent agent, spread across crore funding from VCs like Intel Capital, 239 offices. Khera said that the company Headland Capital and International Fi- has done well, the outlook is even nance Corporation in 2009. stronger with the government focus of Manish Khera, CEO and Director of using the business correspondent chanFINO, has led the company since incep- nel for cash subsidies, and the RBI's detion to connect micro-customers with rive to achieve financial inclusion.
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August 2011

cover

story

the

Creating Experience
By Hari Anil
Mukund Mohan, CEO

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uman psyche is very strange and unpredictable. A simple gesture like a small gift on their birthday from the company can go a long way and make an employee feel very happy and valued. Similarly an unexpected souvenir for New Year can at times make people feel overwhelmed with joy and make them feel appreciated by their company. Small acts like these can make the employees feel that they are an integral part of the company and that their company cares about them. Can this be taken forward to increase brand loyalty? Will this help in reducing the attrition rate? The answer is yes! But how can a company with hundreds or even thousands of employees and very large number of customers keep a track of all this? Well, they can let Jivity handle it for them. Bangalore based Jivity specializes in providing brand engagement solutions for companies and educational institutions. Companies are desperately trying to retain their customers by employing devices like advertising, social media, public relations and more, but falling short of this goal many a times. Higher salary packages and other benefits are often offered, but employee attrition still remains as a major challenge. When all these means are failing, what is it that a company can do to increase their brand loyalty still remains as the bigger question! Jivity is trying to answer by employing its merchandising capabilities to actively engage the employees, customers and partners of their customers. We let the companies understand what part of their brand people like and appropriately run their brand merchandize, thus helping them to improve brand loyalty, says Mukund Mohan, CEO, Jivity.
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August 2011

Customers and employees can directly access the online brand store to look at merchandize offered, get status on their rewards, and to pursue redemption options.
The company starts by identifying the brand placement of its clients. Understanding is the key; understanding where a company is standing in terms of brand value, loyalty and engagement, and then figuring out what can be done to improve it. Jivity puts a lot of efforts into this, and this helps them in successfully taking the next step. Based on the result of the first stage, the company devices the plan and strategy to take the branding further. It then goes towards merchandize selection and innovation. With its in-house designers Jivity custom designs merchandize for its customers. As a result of this approach the products that come to the table are very specifically personalized products which fit the customers image. For example, one of its customers is a trucking company and Jivity built a miniature of the clients truck with their emblem and all the other details. One of our customers, wanted to put together a green campaign and so we put together a whole bunch of eco friendly products that they could give to their employees and customers along with the other products that they have, says Mohan. Jivity works out a monthly engagement campaign for each of their customers. In the month of any particular festival the prices of anything and everything associated to that festival go sky high. This is another target area for the company, they will bring products that are relevant to that particular festival to their stores and let its cusThe Smart Techie

Modus Operandi

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tomers provide this to their employees at reasonable prices. At this point, the company is preparing for the Independence Day campaign, in the month of September they will be putting together a Rakhi related campaign, after that Ganesh Chadurthi, and this goes on. Thus helping the employees get good quality festival products at very affordable rates at the apt time. Jivity Rewards is a hosted software solution that the company provides to its customers to help them administer and manage the program. The customers and employees can directly, from the clients website, access the online brand store to look at merchandize offered, get status on their rewards, and to pursue redemption options. Since the portal is seamlessly integrated into the clients intranet site, it is only visible to their employees. But there are many who are not happy buying online, who wants the touch and feel of what they are buying, for such people the company has onpremise retail brand stores, Store-onWheels, a temporary retail brand store like a mobile-store, and brand vending machines. From Jivity the brand professionals can obtain results and analytics on top selling products, categories that are selling frequently and new product offerings, analyze the response of the employees and customers of its clients and give feedback to the client. We gather a lot of information like, what the employees like, what they dont like, when their birthdays are, when a

Multinational organizations spend millions every year in the process of hiring, not to mention all the time and other resources they put into this. Then they spend several more millions on training these hired employees. Even though not so much, the small companies are also spending a good percent of their revenue in this. After that they are fighting and struggling through attrition. All the measures they are taking to challenge the attrition, does not seem to have much of an effect. It is in this scenario that Jivity came with their much simpler, effective, and cost efficient brand merchandizing model to engage the employees. The Indian brand merchandizing market is a Rs. 500 crore market which is growing at a very rapid pace. The opportunity present in this market is huge. To leverage this opportunity the company is presently operating in four different sectors, Pharma, Financial Services, Technology and Educa-

The Clients

particular campaigns work, and so on. We put all these together and handle this over to our clients. This also helps us with customizing the products, says Mohan. Using this methodology the company smoothly and cost effectively manages to get the branding done for its clients. The 75 people strong team is deployed in sales, marketing, customer services, fulfillment, delivery and engineering to give its customers very balanced and complete services.

Jivity Team

tion, and boasts over 50 happy customers. These customers include the giants like Dell, Mahindra Satyam, Indian School of Business, TATA Teleservices, Franklin Templeton, Mindtree, Oakridge International School and more. These are all sectors with so many differences, companies are poles apart, but one thing they all have in common is the people. The people are all the same, the same gestures make them happy and appreciated, and this is why Jivitys model works irrespective of the sector. What is so special with Jivity that is attracting all these big shots to it? How is it different from its competition? To help our clients have maximum control in brand merchandising, we give them the option of online brand store, retail brand store, a brand store on wheels, and brand vending machines. No one else has such wide variety of options, says Mohan. This is also a differentiation factor for the company. Keeping the customers and employees of their customers happy and satisfied is the whole motto of Jivity. Jivity have provided us from time to time, various innovative gift items at competitive prices, shorter lead times and pro-actively provided gifting solutions to suit our budget and industry, says one of its customers, Infotech. The company constantly comes up with new and new products, both standard and customized products to keep their clients engaged. On top of this they analyze the data that they generate and improvise them accordingly. This keeps them on the edge at any point of time and this is another reason why the big companies stick to them.

range of products to choose from as well, says Mohan. The company flaunts with more than 100 top notch brands and about 20,000 unique products in 200 different categories. It partners with a lot of these companies to make itself capable of getting the customized products on a regular basis. This wide variety itself makes Jivity stand out in the crowd and that is also a reason why it was able to attract so many customers in such a short period. As if customized products from Levis, Reebok, Fastrack, HCL, Nokia, IFB, Titan, Apple, and the likes are not enough, Jivity makes it a habit to hatch new and new ingenious ways to create and retain that WOW experience among the employees and customers of its clients. Among these are discounts. For example, an employee of Dell walks into Caf Coffee Day or Lifestyle and gets a discount of some percentage since they are an employee of that company. This is sure to make them feel WOW. With such campaigns and promotions they make sure that their end customers stay happy. The company understands the need of the day and manages to bring products accordingly. For example, now the necessity of healthy food habits is becoming popular among the people and they are changing their food habits accordingly, and now the company has started offering organic food materials like daal, rice and more to meet this demand. They also offer their end customers biking tours, trekking, or similar packages to keep them even more engaged.

major player in this fast growing market. As long as the companys focal point remains their customers and they keep on improvising and innovating, the future looks very bright for it, the future can have nothing in store for it than a hockey stick growth.

The Man Behind the Scene

Mukund Mohan, the founder and CEO of the company, has a reputation of building successful companies. He has so far successfully found and sold four entrepreneurial ventures including the social media marketing company,

The Indian brand merchandizing is a Rs. 500 crore market, growing at a very rapid pace. Jivity is leveraging this opportunity by operating across Pharma, Financial Services, Technology and Education sectors

A peek into the future

The WOW experience

The whole point is to reinforce the brand perception among the employees and the customers. We do that by specifically custom creating products for them, and we have a very wide

We intend to increase our number of customers by several fold and we want to be known as a company that creates the WOW experience among the employees of our clients and create a lot of shareholder value, says a highly enthusiastic Mohan about what he wants to do in the future. The company is suiting itself up to become a

BuzzGain. His has made it a routine to follow the technology, entrepreneurial and business circles closely and is a regular blogger on these. Before venturing into the entrepreneurial scenery he has successfully steered leadership teams at HP, Invois, Ariba Technologies and Cisco Systems. He was also on the board of iConclude (acquired by HP), Semantic Defense and Kinetic Brains. Mohan is known for his innovative ideas, ability to build, manage and leads teams to success, and this quality is reflected throughout his career. His experience in the sales and marketing sector made him see the opportunity in the space in India. He thought about how a more effective medium than advertising can be made, how companies can be made into strong magnets that keep on attracting their employees and customers, this thought finally led to the conceptualization of Jivity.
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August 2011

CampPro
ndian mobile industry is an apt example for a mixed baggage. At one end the subscriber base is expected to touch one billion early next year over taking China, on the other hand it forms challenges in the form of stiff competition, high churn rate, low ARPU and stiff regulations. Indian mobile industry, like any other telecom landscape is campaign intensive with multitude of campaigns being launched every day. Operators launch campaigns to meet business objectives like revenue enhancement, increase usage, customer retention, customer acquisition or just communication. Hence Campaigns are the heart of Marketing, CRM & Sales Activity. Operators have also automated campaigns processes like campaign execution and loyalty schemes. But these are just executions systems which are a replacement to manual process and not systems that help marketers in analyzing past campaigns, simulate campaign results and design campaigns that enhance Campaign ROI. In short these systems lack the brain of the campaign ecosystem. In the current scenario, campaigns are not targeted and extended at random to all. To explain with an illustration, if an operator is call campign to 1,00,000 customers and eliciting a response rate of 0.5 1 percent that is 1000 responses, a magnificent wastage of time and resources. On the other hand, a targeted campaign carried out on select customers 20,000 customers is able elicit a response rate of 5 percent is 1000 responses. Now see the realized benefit to the operator in terms of cost and resource optimization and the increased campaign ROI. This is what CampPro set to achieve for operators. CampPro, an analytics solution from Abiba Systems, helps the operators to analyze the subscriber behavior,

10
define target segments, understand the performance of the previous campaigns, and then design targeted and effective campaigns to attain better campaign ROI. CampPro also gives the operators the ability to simulate and test campaigns, and weigh multiple scenarios before the execution of the real campaigns and equip them with intuitive dashboards and heat maps as visual support to take informed

Most Promising

Let the right people know

the right customers, says Jay Bharatheesh Simha, CEO Abiba. Apart for CampPro, other solutions of this Bangalore based company include TeleView, and Champion. TeleView is an integrated business performance analysis solution for telecom industry while Champion is an integrated predictive analytics suite exclusively architected for the same industry. The company also provides

No.
1

PRODUCT NAME

Adatrix BIZense www.bizense.com CampPro Abiba Systems www.abibasystems.com

Description

A platform which can serve ads on all end points and optimize the delivery across channels and across all the different gadgets in the market. It helps the operators to analyze the subscriber behavior, define target segments, understand the performance of the previous campaigns, and then design targeted and effective campaigns to attain better campaign ROI. A comprehensive platform which has three variations for managing operations across Agricultural, Metals, and Energy industries.

Customer Relationship Management - Education Fomax Information Technologies www.fomaxtech.com Dynamic Virtual Desktop DeskStream www.deskstream.com Fiorano SOA Fiorano Software www.fiorano.com HireMantra HireMantra hiremantra.com Mantle Banking Suite Evolvus Solutions www.evolvussolutions.com Verity Paladion Networks www.paladion.net VuNow Verismo www.vunow.com

Commodity Trading & Risk Management solution Eka Software Solutions www.ekaplus.com

It helps track all the enquiries made by the applicants for the courses offered by the institution based on the candidates interest and manage them effectively. A user-centric virtualization platform that can deliver personalized desktops for native execution anywhere, anytime and on any device. A platform for real-time business built on an Event-Driven Architecture (EDA), reducing the time-to-delivery of distributed applications by over 80 percent. An Artificial Intelligence engine that can screen resumes automatically against a job requirement and thus lets the recruiters to spend more time on high quality recruitment tasks.

A package of products that automate all aspects of operations of a bank's retail branch outlet. It is built on a centralised platform, and designed with usability and security control aspects as core objectives. An advanced website malware detection and integrity monitoring solution that continuously monitors website for malware, website blacklisting and unauthorized changes. It alerts website owners with appropriate ways to mitigate the risk. An internet TV platform that brings seamless convergence of linear channels, Internet video, social networking and personal media playback directly to the TV.

10

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decisions. Using CampPro operators can now reduce customer fatigue towards campaigns, ensure campaigns reach the right segment, reduce campaign spends, increase profitability more importantly they can now have absolute control over campaign proceedings. At one end the company starts with analytics to identify the customers and at the other end gives that data to the execution system to then do the execution. Using the solution the companies can also target a few sample customers with their new campaign, analyze their response, and then take it further. In highly matured, highly competitive markets, the operators are more open towards our solution. In fact they demand such applications as customer retention in such markets is a lot harder, and they need the right tools to target

Abiba's CampPro helps the analysts monitor their campaigns.

other business intelligence services such as data sourcing, data management, data analysis and decision support. Many of the customers of Abiba had concerns on costs, user adoption, implementation delays and integration with existing applications and so the company has created their products keeping these concerns in mind. Abiba makes it a point to spend time in understanding the requirement of their customers both their priorities and their constraints. Then recommend and help them implement the correct Business Intelligence and Analytics roadmap for maximizing the ROI of their projects. This approach along with their innovative products has taken the company so far, and it is planning to take this approach further in the coming years.
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August 2011

Adatrix Next Generation Digital Ad platform

10
Most Promising

10
A Customer Relationship Management for Educational Institutions from Fomax

Most Promising

he technological advancements and innovations are transforming the digital advertising world at a rapid pace. More and more information is being generated and consumed on digital mediums and newer digital devices are constantly emerging making the consumers dive deeper into the digital world than ever before. Content is becoming ubiquitous across all digital consumption mediums and with this the digital advertising boundaries are continuing to blur.

to fund product R&D and building a highly adept technical team around the product has been extremely critical for us to reach the beta launch stage, says Amit Khemchandani, Founder & CEO, BIZense. From technology perspective, the platform is built on erlang - used in massively scalable telecommunication applications and has built-in support for concurrency, distribution and fault tolerance. It enables us to easily scale our platform across multiple servers as

Consumer involvement with multiple digital touch points triggers varied response patterns; tracking of these data streams and behavioral trends in real-time holds the key for relevant and adaptive brand-user engagement. This sketches the background to what the BIZense team has envisioned in their Adatrix platform. The entrepreneurial team at BIZense comprises of IIT alumni having experience in telecom & advertising domains. With a focus on innovation and excellence, this Bangalore based startup is ready to take the digital advertisement market head on with its Adatrix Ad platform. It has taken us one and a half years to architect the ad platform from grounds up, for catering to the emerging demands of the digital advertising industry. Product development is a risky and challenging proposition; Balancing the act of generating revenues
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and when ad serving traffic increases. User interfaces are developed using RAP (Rich Ajax Platform), an eclipse osgi based framework, which provides us capability for building rich, intuitive and extensible frontend, says Akhil Agrawal, Founder & CTO, BIZense. With huge amount of data streams flowing through the system, analytics becomes a crucial element providing insights to the players in the advertising industry. The companys analytics platform builds on top of cross dimensional analysis, sophisticated machine learning algorithms and algorithmic game theory. We have also leveraged concepts from stock market for detecting real time actionable trend patterns, says Priyabrata Kuanr, Head Analytics at BIZense. Adatrix features comprise of a multi-channel ad delivery platform, real time neutral ad exchange, real time

adaptive trend based optimizations and analytics, and an online lead management system. Adatrix is a self-service consolidated ad platform, and can solve multiple pain points for advertisers, publishers, networks and agencies. Although there is competition, it is primarily in the Western markets and their technologies are older and not focused on all the new emerging digital devices. There are four key foundation concepts of Adatrix which are our USP and major differentiator - A proprietary multi screen ad serving technology architected from ground up, a neutral exchange with patent pending algorithms, ability to build private exchanges and adaptive real-time trend based optimizations, says Khemchandani. This level of innovation with a futuristic vision has made sure that the product will be able to create a niche in the market. The product just entered into the beta testing stage and the company has already signed up four customers for a beta. Three of these are Indian companies and one is a German company, from publishing, advertising, and mobile marketing sectors. Adatrix will have the advantage of being an innovative homegrown product with a vision of the future. With the potential growth of digital advertising on multiple digital screens, the company has positioned itself for the future.

t the time of admission a college will get tens of thousands of enquiries from prospective students, but in the end one tenth or even less of these enquires turn into application form submissions. A major share of the enquired students does not get their desired information or prompt institutions and they join somewhere else. But, if all these enquiries can be tracked and followed up, the percentage of application forms submitted will multifold. Most of the education institutions are not able to do so as they lack the proper management system. This is the pain point Fomax Information Technologies is addressing with their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) product for the Education industry. Right from the time an enquiry is generated to the time it is converted into

CRM, says Rajesh Kumar, CEO, Fomax Technologies. The product will track all the enquiries made by the applicants for the courses offered by the institution based on the candidates interest. In this system the privilege of creating users is given to Administrator. Enquiries are created based on the course interested by the candidate and it is assigned to respective user to make follow up. Follow up is made by the users based on the candidate interest. During the follow up if the candidate seems to be not interested the enquiry will be dropped out. There are different modules, of which one is master module. The main purpose of master module is to create or edit, course, course type, university, campaign, enquiry and others. There is also an enquiry module, which enables the users to manage the enquiries. It enables to create en-

an application and the student is made an offer, all the stages are tracked by the

quiry, assign enquiry to respective call executive, edit enquiry, view enquiry,

make follow up. Even though this is a general product, the company will customize it according to the needs of its clients. Fomax has invested a good amount of time in this product making sure it will be flexible enough and fit the needs of different clients. The product is built on open source platform and is cloud based. The company provides its customers two options to deploy the product; they can either buy it or can subscribe it as a service. Its SaaS model seems to be the most popular among its customers as this does not require large initial investment and the companies can subscribe to it when it is most needed for them. The company has not gone aggressively into the market with this product and has not spent much on advertising; still they have six customers who have deployed the product. All these customers leverage SaaS based model and are happy with the results that the product generated. Five of these educational institutions are India based while one is an Australian education institution. This show the need there is for a CRM in the educational field not just in the Indian context but also internationally. In education segment something like this does not exist, and the need for it is huge. We understand this need and we are trying to help our clients with our CRM product, says Vinay N, VP Marketing & Sales. Fomax Technology is based out of Bangalore and primarily focuses on global offshore software development, delivering consulting, systems integration, and outsourcing solutions to clients of all verticals.
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August 2011

10

Most Promising

A Boon for Recruiters

hen you look at an average recruiters life at office, about 80 percent of the work is hard and thankless labor in just screening out mis-fit profiles from a large pile of applications. Only 20 percent of the time gets spent on high quality recruitment tasks such as selection process and communication. This means 100s of hours lost in doing something that adds no value to recruitment process. What makes matter worse is that after all the screening the recruiters are tired and their effectiveness reduces to a great extent, causing large strategic damage to talent acquisition process of the companies. This is a very severe issue and this is what HireMantra is trying to solve. HireMantras product has is an Artificial Intelligence engine that can screen resumes automatically against a job requirement and thus lets the recruiters to spend more time on high quality recruitment tasks. Think of it this way, a recruiter usually requires 20-30 minutes time to match a job requirement with a resume. If you receive 1000 resumes on a job opening, it means you require about 2-4 weeks time in just trying to find top 50-100 resumes out of these 1000. Our technology does it for recruiters in no time. It means recruiters' save about 2-4 weeks of time instantly on every job closure, and get to the next leg of the process, communication and selection, faster, says Subodh Vinchurkar, Founder & Director Business Development, HireMantra. The worldwide recruitment tool market is a huge one worth more than $3 billion. In this market, the amount
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HireMantra

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spend on screening and sourcing alone is about $2 billion. But most of the products available in the market are focused on process management and do not have much focus on the most difficult part of recruitment cycle, which is intelligence to automatically screen resumes against job requirements. HireMantra has built strong IP to solve this difficult problem and companies can use it alongside any recruitment process automation product. The company has so far successfully addressed the pain point with their product and this success is reflected in the overwhelming response of their clients. The challenges that the company has faced when they took their product to market is as unique as the product itself. The value proposition is so strong that some of the customers find it difficult to believe unless they expe-

HireMantra's online applications management platform makes hiring easy.

rience it firsthand. This creates necessity of trial phase that delays sales cycle. Secondly, the recruitment departments tend to categorize all products in this space to either Job Boards category or to Process Category. We are in between the two and it takes a bit of educating to communicate the value, says Vinchurkar about the unique challenges his company is facing in the industry. The company has a clearly stipulated plan for the coming years. Vinchurkar makes it very clear when he says that the company is working towards reducing sourcing and screening pain of thousands of recruiters worldwide in coming years. Already the company has created a sizable difference in the Indian recruitment industry and is expecting to do the same in the overseas market once their expansion process completes.

August 2011

10

Most Promising
Verity performed a detailed study for all of their websites and recommended daily scan for all 35 websites, based on number of pages and content size. Then Verity team enrolled all their websites for daily monitoring in Verity. Customer's webmasters were provided access to Verity portal and restricted access only to their respective websites. Based on the daily scan, alerts are being sent through SMS and email. Based on daily monitoring of websites, summary of findings are being sent to users subscribed for email alerts. All alerts and complete reports have been also available to be accessed through Verity portal. In case of critical alert (if malware found, ma-

he increased dependency and usage of Internet for business has given way to new kinds of threats that a hacker/phisher posses for a business or an individual, one such being infecting business websites with malware. Today, enterprises have large websites and portals hosted on the Internet to conduct business and share information with customers. Attackers target these websites for its large customer base to embed malware and thereby compromise end users computers and data. Most of these websites are not monitored for malware infection, such attacks go unnoticed until a large number of users are infected and compromised. Since there are several independent bodies that monitor and blacklist malware infected websites, for a business organization, its brand image and trust of customers comes at stake. Paladion Networks malware detection solution Verity is designed to effectively thwart these malware threats. An advanced malware detection system, Verity monitors websites for embedded malware content and application level changes that can potentially harm end-users computers. Apart from these it offers manual verification of alerts that are generated helping businesses take corrective measures to contain impact. Traditionally, most businesses use some kind of malware detection solutions but these are limited when it comes to effectiveness of detecting web malware. Traditional applications
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Websites from Malicious Malware

like firewalls and IDS/IPS are ineffective in detecting malware and malicious application level changes. Continuous monitoring of large number of websites is cumbersome and not

Verity: Effectively Protecting

business operations. To meet various business requirements, these sites undergo frequent changes and its important that these changes do not introduce any security weaknesses, malware or

Thus Verity provides an assurance to the customer that the bank's customers can have safe browsing experience in the websites. Most of the times, a business

cost effective. Also many traditional monitoring tools generate large number of false positives that make it difficult to differentiate it from real attacks preventing prompt actions. Further more, malware techniques are evolving continuously and old age detection mechanisms are unable to cope up with it. To cut a long story short, what one need is an advanced website malware detection and integrity monitoring solution that continuously monitors your website for malware, website blacklisting and unauthorized changes. And Verity delivers just that, says Amirthamurugaraj, Head Products, Paladion Networks. One of the users of Verity is a large private bank which has more than 35 websites that are being used for customer communication and to conduct

malicious code. As a part of website security management, the bank periodically assesses the websites for vulnerabilities and fixes them as well. However, there are obvious limitations with vulnerability scanners in detecting malware and malicious code in websites. Herein, they needed help. The vulnerability scanners have limitations with respect to finding malware, malicious code, website blacklisting and so on. They would check only missing patches, open ports and so on. A daily check on the website to ensure website does not have any malware and malicious code was challenging to them. They evaluated multiple solutions for advanced website malware monitoring which can detect malware, malicious code and blacklisted website URLs in bank's website.

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licious code found, are blacklisted URL found in their website). Critical alerts were notified through SMS for immediate corrective action on the finding. There were several incidents wherein the customer was notified with presence of suspicious code in their website and presence of blacklisted URL references in their websites. The webmasters were notified through email and also complete alert details about findings in portal, to take necessary corrective action. The webmasters did necessary corrective action and verity confirmed it in subsequent schedule of monitoring and suppressed the alerts.

does not realize that its website has been malware infected and blacklisted by independent monitoring agencies. During this time if a business user/customer visits the website user receives an alert from computers browser or the search engine stating the website may harm users computer, prompting user to leave the site immediately. If businesses do not realize the threat, in the long run it affects the companys user trust and brand image before being finally affecting the business, explains Amirthamurugaraj. Verity, being a comprehensive website malware detection tool helps businesses undo/prevent these dam-

ages. One just has to register their website with Verity portal and it will scan website periodically as desired and in case of any malware related activity or change the alerts will sent via email or sms, depending on criticality. An on demand service, the solution automatically conducts frequent check of your website(s) for any Malware compromise, includes detection of obfuscated malicious javascript code, flash files and even external files linked to website, detects nonmalicious changes that could result in possible website defacement and shows the status of your website(s) and alerts through an easy to use Verity web portal. Veritys proprietary application integrity checking technology to detect malicious changes in a website, advanced website spidering technology with configurable options, user friendliness, exhaustive online reporting feature for scans and alert history, makes it is one of its kind solution in the market today, asserts Amirthamurugaraj. Within two years of its launch, Verity has over 30 customers across different business verticals and is effectively securing 200 websites today. In the near future, the company also plans to offer protection against website defacing. Till then it is quietly but effectively safeguarding a number of business from being a victim of malicious malware.
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August 2011

Anytimeretail.com
By Hari Anil

COMPANY SPOTLIGHT

BUSINESS

By ST Team

Fair price, T fair deal

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here is a Maximum Retail Price (MRP) and a Market Operating Price (MOP) in electronic commodity market. Mostly the customers would only get to see the MRP and not MOP, hence the customers are clueless on the huge margin that the vendors are operating with. The customers are literally getting ripped off by many of the vendors in the field. This is an unfair situation and Krishna Sumanth, an ex- Dell employee, saw it for what it is and he along with his brother Vamsi Krishna , an ex-eBay employee, decided to do something to resolve this situation. For an Indian entrepreneur who saw this kind of success electronic retailers like Amazon.co.uk and dabs.com have in UK, it is only logical to think why the same cannot happen in India. Sumanth, when returned to India in 2005, thought on these lines. He also knew by engaging a similar method the sector can actually be made a fair play segment for the customers as well. He knew that by employing an online model high quality products can be provided to the customers at reasonable prices. This realization led him to start anytimeretail.com. The company was founded in 2010 and is based out of Bangalore, Karnataka. The company offers products in segments like laptops, desktops, servers, peripherals, electronics, special offers, software, storage and networking, and printers. The concentration is on price and quality. We only offer branded products to our customers, no unbranded low quality product will be there on our website, and we provide these products at a very subsidized price, says Krishna. The company deals with

more than 60 leading brands today, this list includes companies like, Nokia, Apple, Samsung, HTC, Acer, IBM, Dell, Belkin, HP, SanDisk, and more. The SMBs are another segment that is struggling in todays environment. The SMBs cannot afford to play the number game like large corporations, they will not be able to buy 100s of desktops or laptops in a go and get discounts. Another issue that the SMBs are facing in India is that unless the organization is registered with SEZ they are not allowed to download import equipment from abroad without duties. So the business model of anytimeretail.com lets the SMBs have all the equipment, including mid range servers, at affordable prices. This is one of those areas that the company concentrates on. Similar companies that are in the industry has a different business model than that of anytimeretail.com, they tend to concentrate on fewer products with higher profit margin so that they can sell it for cheaper price and still make profit. But anytimeretail.com has products ranging from Rs.5 motherboard battery to Rs. 8,50,000 worth storage devices. No other company in the segment can boast of such a wide range of products. The company has recently ventured in more categories including mobiles and is looking strong in this. The six people strong bootstrapped company has presently started thinking about raising their first round of funding. The raised funding will be used for the expansion of the product category and hiring. With their innovative business model the future looks very bright.

ompanion computing is the new buzz word in the world of technology. Smartphones, tablets and notebooks are the emerging companion computing style devices that bring amazing personal and mobile experiences to the place where you are relaxing. The growing adoption of Internet access is creating an environment where consumers are spending an increasing amount of time online, and reducing their engagement with traditional forms of media, such as television and newspapers. Before the consumers were the users of content, now they are the producers of content. For example, about 2.5 billion photos are uploaded and shared among consumers every day. Mobile applications have changed the way we communicate, from day planners to business presentations. A report by Gartner reported that the global app downloads will increase from 8.2 billion downloads in 2010 to 17.7 billion in 2011. Apps generated about $5.2 billion in revenue in 2010.

Smart mobile ecosystem for Entrepreneurs

The SME ventures with small developer teams can give good competition to the biggies, as the trend is not as before where they had to build their own tools and then write their applications. The handset makers are providing the necessary tools for writing the applications and also provide app stores where the applications can be marketed and sold. Narendra Bhandari, Director, Intel Software and Services Group, Intel Asia Pacific discussed the wide business opportunities with entrepreneurs and developers in the field of applications for companion computing at the SiliconIndia Startupcity event which was held in Bangalore. Intel has introduced its Intel AppUp application lab: Meego series. The Meego is that can help app developers create applications of their choice. AppUp also behaves as a marketplace for the applications that is built. Meego is Intels new open source, Linux-based mobile operating system. Meego behaves like a smart ecosystem for entrepreneurs. You will have to figure out how does the user make sure they get what they need to where they are rather than just see devices. The capability of the devices is very important, speed may vary, connectivity may vary and there are other attributes as well which you will have to think about when you build an application, Narendra said. Software developers, global entrepreneurs, industry experts, thought leaders said that the elements like Intel AppUp will monetize the device categories and will give rise to different platforms. It will also help them explore new possibilities for creativity and revenue across multiple platforms, runtimes, devices, storefronts, and distribution options. They also said that the next installment of this revolution might be unfolding right now with the proliferation of Indian-made lowcost smartphones. In a few months, almost everyone will be able to afford a smartphone and so will be just a few clicks away from downloading an app.
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August 2011

The author is Head - Engineering Group, Oriigin IP Solutions LLP

BUSINESS

By Anita Kalia

Copyright Registration:
Is it required?
The status of copyright registered software is much better than that of an unregistered one...What could be the consequences and risk if you developed software application and launched it in the market without any Intellectual Property protection. If the software is free or paid one, and another company claims to be the owner of such software, what will be the course of action? In such case you will be asked to produce the evidence to prove the originality and ownership or valid title of the work, in the absence of which it becomes difficult to safeguard the interests of your own work. However, if you have registered the work with the registrar of copyrights, the certificate of registration is a valid proof of ownership that can be produced as evidence. In another situation, you want to raise capital by taking loan for the business against the software developed by you, the bank may refuse to grant a loan without having any intellectual property protection on the software. have a strong patent regime in India. Patents generally protect inventions which are new/novel, inventive and have an industrial application. Moreover, the subject matter should not fall under any of the categories defined under Section 3 [Inventions not patentable] and 4 [Inventions relating to atomic energy] of the Indian Patents Act 1970. Section 3(k) of Indian Patents Act, 1970 clearly states that computer program per se is not patentable. This, however, does not include those software programs that control the hardware in some or the other form such as embedded system software and more. However, pure software applications, such as a banking software, railways software system, software for general everyday use, web browsers, word processors, and spreadsheet, specialized software such as computer aided design software, accountancy software and others, come within the purview of non-patentable inventions under Indian Patent Law. For such software application, the only recourse for intellectual property protection is under copyright law, which does not protect the basic idea or concept behind the software program, but only the form and the manner in which it is expressed. The basic difference between patents and copyright is that patents protect the Idea or the concept behind an invention whereas a copyright protects the expression of that Idea. There is another good reason to go for copyright rather than a patent is that generally the software patent applications should be limited to inventions having significant present and future commercial value. If the commercial life of software is only a few years, patent protection may not make much sense because it will take at least three to four years for the software patent to be granted and that too is not sure thing to happen due to strict patent laws in India. The period for patent registration is a long one in the light of technology boom where a latest technology becomes obsolete in few months.

ent people. A person who expresses an idea can first claim copyright individually on such expression of the idea. A person who writes such a software program first, gets a copyright only in the manner it is written and not the methods and algorithms behind it. Copyright protection subsists in both source code and object code that are protected against literal copying. However, look and feel of the software gets protection as artistic work. Copyright is a form of intellectual property protection granted under Indian Copyright Act 1956, to the creators of original works of authorship such as literary works, dramatic, musical and artistic works, cinematographic films and sound recordings. Registration of the copyright creates a public record of the claim of copyright ownership with the statutory authorities that index the records on the copyright register which contains works title and the authors name. The copyright register is accessible to anyone and helps people find out the owners of copyright whom they can get licenses from to use a copyright work and helps to prevent fraudulent transfers of copyright ownership. The purpose of copyright is to promote learning and progress in intellectual pursuits by encouraging authors to make their works available to the public. Since the copyright protection for abstract ideas would undermine that goal by permitting one author to have a monopoly on the idea itself, the idea is left in the public domain while leaving various expressions to the exclusive exploitation by the authors. It is interesting to note that even though copyrights operate territorially, it is recognized virtually worldwide under the Berne Convention and is applicable uniformly to its 184 member states that include countries such as

Registration of the copyright

Extent of copyright protection

Why copyright, not patent?

Now the question arises as to why to go for copyright protection when we

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Since copyright protects the expression of Idea, now the meaning of the term expression has to be understood well before any further discussion. We all know that one idea can be expressed in a number of different ways by differ-

Copyright Protection worldwide

The most interesting fact about copyright is that the copyright protection arises automatically and is inherent when an author fixes an original work on any tangible medium of expression. Under the Indian Copyright Act, the owner of a copyright may register his or her copyright claim with the Copyright Office, but no formal registration is required to create the rights of copyright. Registration is, however, a prerequisite to initiating an action for copyright infringement as it establishes prima facie proof of rights. As per the Indian Copyright Act, the Registers of Copyrights shall be prima facie evidence of the particulars entered therein and documents purporting to be copies of any entries therein, or extracts there from certified by the Registrar of Copyrights and sealed with the seal of the Copyright Office shall be admissible in evidence in all courts without proof or production of the original. Copyright registration is compulsory in case the owner wants to raise a loan from a bank based upon the copyright work. In order to qualify for copyright registration, the work should be original, without any strict prerequisite to novelty or uniqueness as is required under Indian Patent Law. To be original, a work should be created independently rather than being copied from someone elses work. In other words, the work should be the per-

Is registration really needed?

India, U.S., UK, China, Japan and more. This basically means that a copyright registration in one of the member states will have the same effect, in terms of copyright protection, in the rest of the member states from the date of its registration. Conventions and bilateral agreements address the availability of protection for foreign authors and grant protection to foreign authors under the principles of national treatment or formal reciprocity.

sonal expression of the author. This factor must be distinguished from the concept of novelty, which usually is not required. Independent development is valid defense to a claim of copyright infringement. Copyright protection is conferred automatically the moment the software code is embodied in some medium like ROM, Magnetic Tape, diskette, paper or any other tangible medium. One point worth noting here is that even though the copyright protection arises automatically upon it fixation on a tangible medium, the real problem arises when someone copies an unregistered work. In such a case the protection is no longer automatic and even being an owner, one can not file lawsuit without registering the work. One can not stop infringement without copyright registration. Apart from that there is one more reason to file for copyright registration as soon as possible, is that one can save a decent amount of money that may be wasted in a lawsuit for copyright infringement which includes lawyer fees and litigation costs. Even if not registered, a copyright notice can be affixed on the work and generally consists of the following four elements: The symbol (the letter C in a circle) or the word "Copyright"; The year of first publication of the work; and The name of the owner of copyright. All rights reserved at the end. A prompt copyright registration of software is necessary to prevent unauthorized claiming and copying by others. It also greatly benefits in extracting maximum benefits by way of assigning, licensing and raising capital. It is also true that not all the works are worth registering but in most situations, a work is valuable enough to be registered.
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August 2011

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August 2011

THE LATEST TRENDS IN

The author is CEO, Vital Wires Consulting.

TECHNOLOGY

By Vinay Singh

he word ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) came into existence quite early and it was by 1920 that the modern ERP systems came into full force. The evolution since then has gone through various innovations thereby living up to the spirit of rapid changes taking place in the IT world. ERP calls for constant modifications and upgradation. ERP developers are facing tremendous pressure both from vendors and companies. In this context it becomes important to analyze the ERPS trends and modalities. It was about creating a scalable, maintainable product design and creating an ecosystem of implementation partners, consultant community, skilling infrastructure and product development mechanisms to incorporate customer experiences in future releases. If look in recent past, starting late 1990s and early part of the new millennium integrated technologies and standards made quick progress. It was possible to think of integrating applications made on diverse technologies and running on different platforms. This made it possible for ERP products to include features about integrating enterprise wide functionality with extra enterprise functionality.

ENTERPRISE RESOURCE PLANING

nities for the ERP product leaders in last decade. The growth percentage increases every quarter consistently and currently touches about 30-40 percent new customers every year.

Product Consolidations ERP and Business Intelligence

This is a fast emerging trend of backend product logistics of ERP world. For long ERP product was focused on just the transactional functionality and some static reporting functionality. Business Intelligence used to be a separate product that will run on top of an ERP system and will be sold separately. Most of the ERP vendors have begun to bundle the reporting and analytics as part of the ERP product itself. ERP is a way to integrate the data and processes of an organization into one single system, using sub-systems that include hardware, software and a unified database in order to achieve integration, to store the data for various functions found throughout the organization. The key to ERP is integration. Its main goal is to integrate data and processes from all areas of the organization and unify it, to provide ease of access and an efficient work flow. ERP Systems usually accomplish this through one single database that employs multiple software modules. The ideal configuration is then to have one ERP system for an entire organization, but organizations that are very large have been known to create an ERP system and then add external interfaces for other stand alone systems considered more powerful or able to fulfill the organization's needs in a better way.

software means hosting the software solution at a central location and offering it to multiple users on pay as you use model. Hosting the solution at a central location and offering it over the internet connectivity is also referred to as a cloud computing. Service Oriented architecture refers to architecture of application design that allows for a piece of information to be available on a method call. It facilitates better integration between disparate systems owned by different parties. In many ways it also makes the pay as you go model of cloud computing possible. Since every feature is woven as standalone functionality, it is easier for vendors to have a pricing model where an end user pays for the number of scenarios that are utilized and not for the entire software bundle. Paul Hofmann, VP of SAP Research, sees big technology and business model changes coming for ERP in the future. New technology trends

Over the years it is understood that deploying an ERP and replacing every thing, which was running until then is a critical event. It is wise to keep the scope of first phase as less as possible and land the plane. Particularly with larger number of midsize companies with not too many spare human resources implementing ERP systems, it is clear that if you fly the plane too long, you run a higher risk of never landing. Increasingly implementers have started suggesting a step by step way of adopting ERP systems. Roadmap strategy is also conducive to the need of midsize companies who look for shorter cycles of return on investment.

Roadmap Strategy of Adopting ERP versus Big Bang

such as high performance computing, pervasive connectivity, Web services, and SOA will affect the front end as well as the back end of ERP.

A glimpse of time to come

In coming times there will be considerable amount of improvement in the way an organization integrates itself with every other entity, which is involved in the process of business. One can envision all interactions with suppliers, clients, logistics partners, finance partners and government agencies to be occurring over ERP systems. For foreseeable time in future its going to be the transformation to Software as a Service model that will consume most mind share of product owners, implementers and end users. ERP trends reflect positive signals for the ERP vendors and companies availing their service. It is important to remember the fact that both the vendor and the company will be able to make use of any advantage (including the modern facilities) only through proper coordination, teamwork and nurturing a cordial atmosphere. Mere IT ERP trends will not help in this aspect.

CURRENT TRENDS

Adoption of World-class products by Midsize Companies With robust delivery infrastructure of ERP product leaders, the myth that world class ERPs such as SAP or Oracle can be adopted only by large companies has been busted fair and square. There is a sharp increase in the adoption rate among midsize companies world over. China and India have provided sharpest software sales opportuThe Smart Techie

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Users had long wished to run execute ERP functionalities on a handheld. There are several situations when a person is on the shop floor, away from his workstation and feels the need to commit a transaction or lookup for information. Same is true for in-field sales force of companies who handle the distribution network. Executive leaders of a company wish as well to have ready to analyze information on their PDA. Realizing the importance of this, the largest market share holder SAP acquired Sybases mobile application platform in year 2010.

ERP Functionality on Mobile Handhelds

The buzz words SOA, Cloud Computing, SAS

In the pursuit to make the ERP product affordable, vendors have taken it in a completely different model of delivering the software. Software as Service (SAS) model of delivering

August 2011

STARTUP CITY

By Vimali Swamy

How to build a world class

technology company
in India?

t is often said, that great technology companies do not come out of a vacuum but from technology disruption or big changes in the market forces or customer forces. While India has witnessed a great success in the IT industry with its prowess in services, the last decade is seeing a new wave in the industry where many are making a great attempt to move from the services legacy left by the likes of Wipro, Infosys, Cognizant and others. But the new generation of entrepreneurs that has gripped the Indian IT industry is focusing on buzz words like software product and Intellectual Property. It is observed that though are and have been great ideas that have been circling the market, a very few actually hit the spot and created a name for themselves. In most cases what seems to be missing is that X factor that perhaps holds the key to an entrepreneurs success.

So what does it actually take to build a world class technology company in India? This was the question that was addressed at the CEO Conclave held by SiliconIndia in its flagship event - Startup City in Bangalore. Are you ready to be an entrepreneur? One has heard the clichd talk of an entrepreneur needing a passion and belief in his or her ideas and not giving up on it but there seems to be a need for more than that if one truly wants to be able to build a successful product. Dr. Vivek Mansingh, President - Collaboration & Communications Group, Cisco India, advises that though entrepreneurship is becoming a trend today among the youth, but one must not jump into this bandwagon unless you are sure you are ready for the long haul. He believes that to be an entrepreneur one needs to have certain personality traits. Startup is not for everyone. Do you have the personality and have demonstrated the abilities in your job so far that makes you believe you are ready for a startup?, he asks. Ability to think far, having a passion and conviction, ability to persevere, risk taking abilities and strength to face failure, having a thick skin to face rejection, ability to think different are some of the essential personality traits one must posses before joining the startup bandwagon. The best way is to have some honest people around you and let them judge whether you have these qualities, suggests Dr. Mansingh. Engage with customer: They decide the fate of your company But what if you are an entrepreneur material, do you also have the right idea/product that is sure to disrupt the market. Many a times one has a good idea but when it comes to practical application of it, most of us fail. Shoaib Ahmed, President, Tally Solutions recalls, his experience as an entrepreneur before starting Tally Solutions. He has

When you are doing some thing big, there are always the naysayers but you must have the inner conviction

Entrepreneurship is becoming a trend among the youth, but do not jump into this bandwagon unless you are sure you are ready

Dr. Manish Khera, Cisco India

The Smart Techie

started a software company with out knowing what to do. Though he had some ideas but was unsure how to go about it. He approached one of his friends who did market research, identified market needs and helped companies take effective decisions. When he him about the company, ideas and the work, he gave an advise that Ahmed has held on to till date. He said, Shoiab, dont waste your money with me. Rather what you need to do is go out to the market, meet customers, engage with them and they will tell you whether what you are saying has enough value or not and will actually work, reminisces Ahmed. The fundamental source of all revenue and all your decision making and design is based on your customer. In todays excitement and energy we tend to forget this focus. Though this takes time, but one needs to have patience even though there is tremendous pressure to bring in things faster. I believe that the innate sense of what is the right thing to do, what they say is the instinct of a
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Mukul Kumar, PubMatic

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August 2011

a period of time. Are you sure you will last long; will you invest in a R&D for next five years, he asked. These are some of the concerns customers abroad have about the software companies from India, explains Garg.

Shouvick Mukherjee, Yahoo! India R&D

No matter how big your company is, give personal attention to the happenings around
CEO comes from these things, which is, to be able to go out and understand what the right thing to do is. To cut a long story short, it is important to trust your instinct which developed over a time, is the key to success, he adds. Similalry, Manav Garg, CEO& Founder, Eka Software, shares his story of building a product company. Having come from the commodities and trade background, he had met more that 500 companies. Though all of them talked about the need for a proper system, there was no one doing anything about it. One day he decided to leave his job and started Eka Software. It was then during a meeting with a CIO of a Fortune 500 company that something he said made Garg work on his ideas. After the meeting, the CIO told me, though the product is great but he was apprehensive about it as he had seen even a single product company from India that could confidently claim to continue existing in the market after
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Hunger and Passion: The back bone of a startup Obama once visited a school in the U.S. and told the kids there that kids in India and China are truly hungry and hardworking. Hunger here means passion. Shouvick Mukherjee, VP & CEO, Yahoo! India R&D, recalls his experience of working with the founders of Yahoo! in the late 90s. When I joined Yahoo! 11 years ago, it had already become a highly valued company. But even then I saw David Filo and Jerry Yang put in at least 16 hours of time to make sure every product is successful, he says. Back then Yahoo! used to do one push every night at midnight. Though there automated

Shun the Naysayers When Mukul Kumar, Co-Founder and Senior Vice President Engineering, PubMatic along with his co-founder was building an ad server, there were many who said it would not work. There were many companies like Double Click which had been doing it for a long time and for a startup to attempt same was impossible. We bought two computers and set it up in my garage and started working on it. Though many discouraged us, we decided to follow our hearts and our minds. All the while we also took in some advice given to us by others, says Kumar. In three months time both had built the ad server and in six months they had released it to several ad publishers. It turned out to be one of the most performing ad servers in the market. One of the lessons I learn was that when you are doing some thing big, there are always the naysayers but you must have the inner conviction but realistic, advises Kumar.

scripts to check this, but still they would see them sit and check everything on page before leaving for home. And at that point Yahoo! was valued at least $30-40 billion. No matter how big your company is, you should always ensure everything is running smooth and give personal attention to the happenings around. It is this level of passion and hunger that makes people successful. Another thing is customer base. When you are in consumer oriented business like Internet or Mobile most often you do not see your customers. You can see consumer patterns but not actual consumers. Leverage on the data you have, if you are building a global company then make use of the data insights for it will give you a the right market indicators and customer demands, says Mukherjee.

Organizational Culture: Most times, when asked why are you starting a company?, people do

not have the right answer. Decide why you want to do it. Is it because you want to make a quick buck or want to create a legacy of a business. Vikram Shah, President and Director, NetApp India talks about the day the CEO of NetApp addressed the team after its successful IPO. He asked the team that now that we have done it and are successful what is it that you want to do? Unanimously the team replied that they wanted to build a model company. It is this thought and vision that matters. Team is important and a successful company is built by the team. Very often people start a company with people who have been loyal and with one for a long time. This is the wrong approach. When I went to start a company ten years ago, I had a great plan, a great PPT and I met Kanwal Rekhi.

He looked at me and asked me about my founding team. I told him how each one of them had been with me for the last 10-12 years. He said I have a wrong team because they are too loyal to question you, says Shah. Handpick the first 25 people in your organization and ensure they are the best you can get out there. This will ensure that the team they recruit later would be the best. At the end of the day, what matters is the culture when building a company. As a founder ensure you have built an organizational culture where the employees feel a sense of freedom for their thoughts. When an organization grows, several layers come in where and an innovative idea gets lost in these.

Hand pick the first 25 employees. Surround yourself with people who are competent and not those who are loyal

Do you have the confidence that you will exist in market after two years? Clients want to have that assurance before they engage with you

Shoaib Ahmed, Tally Solutions

Go out to the market, meet customers, engage with them and they will tell your idea will work or not
Manav Garg, Eka Software

Other Dos and Donts for a Startup Be stingy: Even if you have raised venture capital, count your pennies. Make sure every dollar, rupee is accounted for and try to break cash flow even. Once you do that you have a lot more options. You can approach customers confidently and they will believe your stories. Never think you are right at the first time: You will make mistakes through out but learn from them. Never lose focus and walk through the value proposition with your customer. Being in right place at right time, this will give you less room to make mistakes. Take risks: You have already taken the first plunge by giving up a well paid secure job to become an entrepreneur. The risk taking does not stop there. When you go to market and build a product, you have to decide and balance what features to build. Every customer will demand, the earth and the moon and the stars from your product, but it you have to decide what to include and what not to. Identify what features will fetch you money and keep customers happy. Know your market: Dont follow trends create trends. Unless you know

your customer, trends will not help you. Trends only help in value proposition. People: Invest in sales early on. Build a strong sales team even if your product isnt ready. They will go out and help the word get out for your product, line up customers and create a pipeline for demand. This way you will not have to start the sales cycle until after the product is ready as sometimes it takes too long a time. Be ready for change: Never underestimate the power of your invention but falling in love with it is also a bad idea. Be ready to change it if the need be. Do not confuse loyalty with competence: Surround yourself with competent people not loyal people. Success is what other people do to you. Ensure you have credibility in people around you so that they will accompany you in the journey.
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Vikram Shah, NetApp India

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August 2011

The author is AVP & Unit Planning and Assurance Manager, Infosys

MANAGEMENT

By Ramana Venkata Udathu

inancial Institutions all over the world are embracing the Social Media as alternative channel for expanding the banking services and improving the communication with customers. However, banking industry is still in the early stages of evolution with respect to social media initiatives (SMI). Currently the number of SMIs is relatively small and is expected to grow rapidly. While a lot of banks consider these as ways to gather information about the customers and profile them to position themselves favorably, they
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Social Media in Banking: Ten Business imperatives for Banks.

are unclear of the objectives and benefits of social media. Early adopters of social media in the banking industry have faced a few challenges in the approaches and in attracting attention from large number of customers or prospects. Some are already revamping previous avatars and re-launching the new portals to find success in these initiatives. Some questions in the minds of the bankers are Do customers like others to know the financial transactions they have performed or would they like to discuss these with community at large in the open forums? Arent financial services more personal and hence are the banks and their customers ready to share them in the social space? Will these open up channels which invade on the privacy of the banks and the customers? Let us discuss the key business imperatives for the banks to leverage social media. 1. Alternative channel: Many banks have leveraged SMIs for launching the innovative service channels such

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as blogs or social networking sites. While these may not replace the existing channels for banking, they are expected to complement if integrated well with other front ending channels and the back end hosts. Each of the early adapters such as Fortis (Join2Grow), ING (pickuradvisor), Barclay card (wtfcollective.com), BOA (Small Business online community), Amex (Open Forum), SEB (The Benche), HSBC (yourpointofview.com) in the social media space have approached it differently and are trying to create differentiation. 2. Building communities: Research has shown that community users have remained customers longer than others. With right segmentation, banks can target their business processes, products and services around these communities. Social media communities could potentially call for internal as well as external change in the way banks function in this decade. External to the organization, SMIs will help shape the customer behavior and trigger internal changes in building capability and agility for servicing the customers. Several other industry sectors have already leveraged SMIs and offer customized and personalized products. Travel industry for instance, has seen some initial successes. Banks have started building communities for small businesses, trade finance, cash management; SME markets or customers are a good target segments for the banks to build communities; likewise, the GenY, in 18 to 25 years, for education loans, credit cards, young student accounts. Take for instance, the young working professionals with 2-3 years of experience and planning to take up management education for career advancement, as a target community; they have common interests in like institution ratings, grades required, educational loans offered in the market place. Success lies in the ability

to demonstrate the understanding of the segment / market requirement and convince people of the value of your platform and to give them a good reason to use it. It has to be simple to register and intuitive to use. Research has shown that consistency and persistence is extremely important for long term success of the social media banking. 3. Communication: One of the biggest advantages of SMIs is low cost communication of the events, news, product launches, milestones

Early adopters of social media in the banking industry have faced a few challenges in the approaches and in attracting attention from large number of customers or prospects.
and achievements by the bank. Unlike traditional modes of communication, social media portals truly work as two way communication channel. For a retail bank with large customer base this could give a significant advantage by usage of Hashtags, Blogs, Audio & Video Podcasts, Online chats, Discussion Widgets; in the SME segment, peer-to-peer communication as a means of creating communication channel across customers can be extremely effective. 4. Development on Web2.0 and leveraging technology : Two important aspects of the Web2.0, Web as a platform and user positioning of Member controls data can be leveraged well by the banks using SMIs as well as integration with Facebook, Twitter, mySpace, iTunes, YouTube etc. Formulation of legal & corporate policy on the information security, authentication for members, firewalls

for access have and monitoring on a continuous basis is extremely important in this context. As for technology implementation, banks should use reusable components, which can be built once and sharable across channels, and systems. While there are several independent sites in the context of banking industry, banks can build specific portals to suit the objective, positioning and target communities. When the banks launch platforms leveraging the latest technologies such as Web 2.0, success does not come by easily and multifold increase in benefits may take few months or quarters. SMIs should not be led by technology team alone, success will be limited if the CEO is not involved in driving the change. Leveraging technology by integration of platform & process can be extremely powerful to achieve the objectives with respect to a target customer or segment. 5. Empowering customers: Financial services are based on relationships and hence the banking SMIs need to have a model where the generic solutions can be offered in the social space and the specific ones in the private space; While GenY is less apprehensive of sharing the information in the social media, many other segments have a different point of view. Usage of personal financial tools or modeling tools can truly empower customers. Large corporations are going beyond the financial transactions to engage & empower the customers; by the active participation of the members in various initiatives such as the environmental action groups, CSR initiatives etc; Citicards campaigns such as CitiForward, Make a Difference, One Friend at a time, are examples of approaches to harness the social networks, combined with charity giving or participation towards a social cause. Some of the retail industry giants have been able to garner commitment from the
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August 2011

6. Fulfillment through customer service: Typical banking customer expects personalized service offering and is willing to share the feedback in the social media, hence customer reviews should be an integral part of the customer service portals. Customer expectations have changed in the digital media era; expressing online and expecting the response and reason behind an incident is very common now. Ability and willingness to respond is the key to build and improve the customer service on this channel like other channels. SMIs offer windows of opportunity for the banks to render improved customer service by integration with the social media applications like Twitter or Facebook. For example, embedded live Twitter feeds help in making the service effective for the GenY customers. The trick is in making the portals more and more open, but give extra value to the target groups or individuals. Perception among the Banking community is that the User Generated Content has several risks though the customer listening mechanisms have the power of leveraging the knowledge of millions of existing customers as well as prospective customers; well then, would the portal become a customer grievances forum! Admitting mistakes and posting corrective actions will build the customer trust and perceived as improved customer service. If managed
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customers for saving energy, reducing waste and water management through SMIs. However, sometimes, the empowerment may go beyond the usual business relationship and pervade across larger management decisions; recently at a large European bank which was bailed out by the government in the financial crisis, online campaign by customers in the social media space has caused the bank to disallow bonuses awarded to bank executives!

in a right way, and if banks can carefully strategize, some of the contributors to the social media sites can be converted into potential brand communicators. 7. Global Brand building through Marketing & Promotion: Social media portals can be a market place where customers can see comparative analysis of the products and services. Embracing and achieving success in the social media banking can potentially create Most engaging Global brands. Many banks have channel banking specialists who are recharging themselves in to roles such as VPSocial Media, E Commerce Marketing Manager, and Account Managers for Twitter, Facebook, Experiential Marketing Managers, Content Managers, Web2.0 specialist etc. Success lies in having a senior level executive who understands the social media space for creating the most visible initiatives. Banks have to take cognizance of the fact that SMIs can also adversely impact the brand reputation! 8. Honesty, Trust & Transparency: Being an Honest organization is considered a differentiation in the context of the global financial crisis, more importantly for financial insti-

Worldwide spending on the gaming ecosystem will exceed $74 billion in 2011, up 10.4 percent from 2010 spending of $67 billion. By 2015, spending will reach $112 billion, highlighting major technology and business model transitions, reports Gartner

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tutions. SMIs can help build trust and transparency by having a platform. Financial institutions have to rethink and rework on the strategies to keep the customer loyalty by sharing relevant information with customers. SMIs provide great opportunity to mitigate the risk by participating in and building trusted relationships for long term sustainability leading to growth. 9. Influencing additional revenues: In a scenario where customers would like to get or at least perceive that they get customized offerings based on the relationship and wallet size, how can banks leverage the social media for additional revenues? Effective engagement should lead to increased revenues by developing private business content and offering differentiated service by sieving through the milieu of opportunities. Return on Engagement then, could be a measure for tracking the growth of business, user base, increase in leads, number of products and services per customer. 10 Joint product development: Cocreation of products and services over a period of time is another key business driver for the banks to embrace social media. It is a means to understand the needs and requirements, build new products or services and soft launching in smaller communities to meet their interests, especially for cooperatives, credit unions and town banks. In the context of large banks, customization of the products for various communities by active involvement of the user groups is a possible approach. Rewarding the members for visiting, promoting and contributing to the ideation and product innovation is important to sustain this model. Like it or not, banks cannot stay away from the Social Media Initiatives; however, they need to choose what suits them most in their context!

CIO brainstorming and IT Strategies explained in Chennai

By Akanksha Ravindran

EVENT

What CEOs and the Board Expects from the CIO and IT Head IT management can become saturated by supply-side thinking, what the IT industry will offer next and how best to assimilate that? The CEOs and the Boards no more look at IT as support system, but one that would help in establishing competitive edge in the market place. And the expectation is not when would the ROI yield be but how would it manifest. It is through an order of magnitude improvement in productivity & analysis in finger tips to be able to make the right business decisions said Chandrasekaran N, CIO from Ashok Leyland who kick started the first panel discussion. The panel also addressed issues like What are the boards and CEOs thinking and what business agenda must IT leaders deliver to? The other speakers in the panel were Manavalan MK, DGM- Technology from Sankara Nethralaya, Amol Vidwans, Group Head - Information Technology, MARG and the Moderator for the panel was Biji Varughese, Head IT (West & South), McDonald's India. Business drivers, Strategy and Solution for next-generation Enterprise IT was discussed at length when Sethu Madhavan, Director Marketing &

hat are our CIOs busy doing? What are the challenges they face today? These are the questions which brought together some great minds in the CIO Strategy Summit conducted by Siliconindia on 14th August 2011, at Chennai. After the resounding success of the Bangalore and the Mumbai editions, this time around CIOs from different organizations and sectors in Chennai gathered to attend the summit.

Strategy from Huawei came on stage. Then Shoaib Ahmed, President from Tally solutions took over and spoke about Design Bringing Efficacy To Enterprise Solutions and Speaking on the principles of Design of the Product Tally.ERP 9, he said that successful products work with the Law of Conservation of Complexity that complexity cannot be minimized it can only be moved.

The Competitive CIO How can CIOs retain their IT role, while effectively using their skills and passion to provide value within several divisions of the company? Balakrishnan Venkataraman, Ex CIO from Polaris Software said, The importance is of being competitive and not just competent. CIO's today, have to drive cost benefits for business in the employment of IT - and be visibly cost effective over external sources of solutions, so that businesses see the value of the internal IT setup and the CIO. Further the panel set up a debate on the aspect and importance of keeping business in the driving seat, with CIO understanding and supporting the business need, and helping businesses get the project budget and a good Business ROI. Emerging Technologies and Trends: IT game changer? Adoption of new technologies such as cloud based services, social media and virtualization have accelerated and is

accelerating changes in the role, structure and purpose of IT. Emerging technologies have a lot of potential to create a niche for any business in the market. However, organizations should be careful in evaluating what is right for them. What is good for a certain industry segment may not be good for another. At the same time every organization should evaluate what they want and what they could achieve in logical units of time. said Arvind Sivaramakrishnan, CIO, Apollo Hospitals which was appreciated with a huge round of applause. Adding to the same thought our copanelist Harinath Chakravarthy, CIO, TVS Logistics said, Emerging technologies, especially the social media tools like twitter are game changers, but the effectiveness of these technologies needs to be supported by a strong business case". Cloud Computing is the next big thing! Caution . Be cautious. It has its usage. Use it where no of transactions are not huge i.e., Email , CRM etc said Chandran R, CIO, Daimler India Commercial Vehicles(Benz). Broad Takeaway: Summing up the whole experience,A CIO's job is something which one has to learn the hard way as there are no quick fixes to success. The key to success of any IT project is how well the IT and the User department collaborate. said Prem Kamble, Management and IT Consultant (Ex- CIO - Sutherland Global Services). The event had a great ambience, with the speakers coming from diverse background made it a good mix of thoughts from all industries. This event was sponsored by Huawei, Tally Solutions, Sonata Software and Clover Infotech.
The Smart Techie

August 2011

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August 2011

The author is Practice Director for Portal & EA, Fulcrum Worldwide

TECHNOLOGY

By Digant Shah

Is your organization spending too much money building IT systems ?

Market study on value derived from Information Technology A recent survey (sponsored by a leading research analyst firm in conjunction with Financial Executives International) of 344 CFOs at North American companies involved in manufacturing, financial services, healthcare, energy, transportation and other fields seems to indicate that CFOs dont think much of the information technology in their companies and the people who provide it. As per the survey only 25 percent see the CIO as a key player in determining the business strategy while less than a quarter of the CFOs felt the IT department delivers the technology innovation needed by the business. Not only this; only 18 percent of the CFOs thought that their IT service levels meets or exceeds business expectations. biggest challenges which has always surfaced is that IT is hindering the organization's ability to respond to current, and future, market conditions in a timely and cost-effective manner.

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Business Perception of IT and challenges faced by IT IT departments in various organizations are perceived poorly by business. All the IT projects undertaken to implement business change are perceived as expensive IT Projects, which deliver less value than expected. The return on investment and value for money from IT is also perceived as relatively low. Another challenge that they face is from IT systems which have become unmanageably complex and increasingly costly to maintain. One of the
August 2011

Case for Enterprise ArchitectureAssessments IT Executive Management and the CIOs office is increasingly under pressure to justify IT spends and can no longer afford to ignore the perception that IT does not deliver Business value. More and more CIOs are now using Enterprise Architecture (EA) assessments as a medium to build a case of how IT investments are being aligned with business goals and to present a big picture to the management that combines IT strategy, information systems and technology domains with the business architecture. Enterprise Architecture (EA) describes enterprise goals, business process, roles, organizational structures, organizational behaviors, business information, software applications and computer systems in a comprehensive manner. An Enterprise Architecture Assessment is a vendor- neutral assessment focused on validating the current Enterprise Architecture to help an Organization document existing architecture and create a strategy and road map for target architecture based on organizational business drivers and prioritization of IT goals.

EA Assessment Approach, Benefits & Outcomes Most of the EA assessments are conducted using popular EA frameworks like Zachmann, TOGAF, Federal Enterprise Architecture or Gartner Model. At Fulcrum, based on our experiences of conducting EA assessments for various organizations,we feel that the best choice is a blend of all of these methodologies, in a way that works well within that organization's context and constraints. Fulcrums approach to assessment of the EnterpriseArchitecture is to establish transparency around the current maturity level of the organizations AS IS Enterprise Architecture in terms of its ability and agility to scale up to business demand

One of the main outcomes of the EA assessment is measurement of the overall maturity level of the organizations EAby using level statements that can be used as benchmarks as given below: Level 0: Undefined: No IT architecture program. No IT architecture to speak of. Level 1: Initial: Informal IT architecture process underway. Level 2: Under Development: IT architecture process is under development. Level 3: Defined: Defined IT ar-

Figure 1: Above diagram indicates that overall EA maturity is at level 1

chitecture with written procedures & Tech Reference Model. Level 4: Managed: Managed and measured IT architecture process. Level 5: Optimizing: Continu o u s Figure 2: Another important outcome from EA assessment is clarimprovement of ity on a Roadmap towards achieving the future state architecture. IT architecture Above figure is an example of a 3-year roadmap with quarter over quarter breakdown of IT initiatives along with impact level. process. Measurement is done in individual state architecture and IT strategy categories like Business Architec- that aligns with business goals & viture, Data Architecture, Gover- sion. One of our responsibilities lies nance, Planning, Process in preparing informed business Framework, Architecture Blueprint, cases to invest into technology enablers that help expedite turnaround time to the customers. We ensure that IT is process driven and not people driven through process enablers and governance strategy. Along with that we also provide cost optimization and investment roadmap (people, process and technology) with an actionable 3-5 year plan that best suits your organizations vision and justifies every dollar of IT spend. Communication, Compliance, Integrated EA Program, Performance, IT Implementation etc. and then the total aggregated score is calculated to determine the overall EA maturity level. A reference diagram is provided below. Along with that we try to avoid gaps in business/technology patterns which may be detrimental in the short and long term delivery capabilities to customers. We promote adoption to the voice of customer and creating a re-alignment strategy through clearly documented future

Conclusion The starting point for any enterprise architecture is self-introspection. There are two vital questions which will always arise in the minds of the entrepreneur: is your organization spending too much money building IT systems that deliver inadequate business value; is your organization truly committed to solving these problems, and does that commitment come from the highest levels of the organization? If the answer to the above two questions is yes then enterprise architecture is your path towards helping IT deliver business values.
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August 2011

The author is Co- founder, CEO, MarketSimplified

Redefining the Financial Marketplace

Mobil it y
TECHNOLOGY
By Venkat Rangan

e are in the midst of a technological revolution mobile phones are taking over the world and redefining technology, business in the process. Having surpassed the adoption of laptops and desktops already, mobile phones are poised to break five billion subscription mark over the last year. Today, mobility is no longer a novel idea, and not just a tactical move. Its a fundamental requirement for virtually every business. With fixedmobile convergence on the horizon, now is the time to plan for comprehensive way to ensure mobility. It delivers maximum value as a strategic tool for the enterprise In countless ways, mobility is boosting business productivity, speed and responsiveness. Tools like notebook computers, PDAs, cell phones, Wi-Fi networks and virtual private networks (VPNs) have turned business on the move into business as usual. But many organizations have implemented mobility in a tactical and piecemeal manner, not realizing the gains possible from adopting a true strategic approach to mobility. Mobility is evolving as the ability to conduct numerous financial transactions in real time. This drives the key to achieve strategic growth in the financial services sector, to establish significant new levels of customer loyalty, and opening new channels of direct, immediate, hands-on, smartphone-driven transactional capabilities. These capabilities manifest themselves in many ways from real-time streaming quotes, to fully managing accounts in real time, to conducting real-time stock execution deals (including real time research, price alerts/quotes and actual buy/sell execution), to making retail purchases directly through a mobile device the list of capabilities is as long as ones imagination allows. Each generation of mobile networks has introduced enhanced capabilities and has reached ever widening drape of consumers. In the 30 odd years since then 2G, 3G and just recently 4G networks have been launched. Mobility is redefining the way trading is conducted to meet the insatiable financial needs. The rapid penetration of smart phone devices and adoption of mobile application is acting as the catalyst. Its been only a few months when exchange boards gave its nod to mobile trading. But the trend has caught up rather rapidly and it is only going to be fascinating from here on. With mobile penetration reaching around 700 million users, against 100 million people using the internet, it makes sense, a mobile application that will help trading for a wider set of public. Mo-

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bility in stock trading market enables users to access, trade, and manage investments securely and reliably. With the line between a Smartphone and feature phone fast diminishing, it is playing a very important role in providing access to maximum number of people. Demographically, across the age group of 25 yrs to 55 yrs people are accessing mobile trading. The advent of non-entertainment applications in India has only just begun, and we see immense potential in financial applications in our country. In the present day mobile age, the penetration of mobile phones and the experimenting nature of consumers have made the use of mobile for financial transactions extremely appealing. The phenomenal growth of mobile telephony across the globe suggests that the consumers are rapidly adapting to mobility and are willing to do more and more with mobile phones. The biggest shift in the common mobile users mindset would be consumer being empowered at all times with real time financial information and his ability to act or react that eventually assists the consumer in this wealth creation or investment process. The power of anytime anywhere is hugely compelling, especially, when time critical information and action is provided on the go. The biggest challenge and of course the opportunity is to create cross platform applications and real time data on mobile applications available on the go. The mobile OS environment is only getting more and more fragmented and in a way complicated. For us it is an opportunity. Some of the features of an application for financial service such as mobile trading include rich visual interface, quick navigation, technical charting, cross network market data streaming, advanced security, push message delivery and complex options or forex orders placement workflow.

Industry trends clearly indicate that financial enterprises need to implement comprehensive mobile and online communications capabilities to facilitate customers in placing trades from their choice of wireless devices. The penetration of Mobile based delivery channel, while very popular has its own share of issues and challenges

Each generation of mobile networks has introduced enhanced capabilities and has reached ever widening drape of consumers.

that are affecting its growth. These issues primarily address the security paradigm, customer experience and data sanity of the financial transactions. Mobility is a fairly new entrant into the financial services space, and is well on its way to becoming the new financial marketplace. The consumer of the future will want to be able to securely move money, check account balances, make payments, buy and sell stocks anywhere, anytime and without being chained to laptop or desktops. Emerging Rural Mobile Market in India, the mobile market in rural India has significant potential with number of subscribers anticipated to grow at a CAGR of around 32 percent during 2011 to 2012. Also the fact that the mobile infrastructure is already in place to leverage any financial inclu-

sion plans. So mobile banking, mobile trading, lends immense scope for financial inclusion, at a much faster pace. Mobile users consider their mobile a connectivity-enabling extension of themselves and increasingly a do-itall device. None can ignore this growing market and making available to their customers the choice of their own wireless device, run the risk of becoming uncompetitive and falling behind. It is becoming obvious that market players are taking the next step of including additional services that are currently being catered to by traditional or virtual means. The nature of the financial businesses is totally different from that of any other payment business, for the very fact that it is the first step towards the convergence dream. The challenge is to transact in real world using mediums that were once limited to the virtual world. Most importantly the adoption will be driven by the compelling nature, simplicity and innovative value adds the application provides. Mobility in this growing industry will have all the players in the ecosystem in a common platform that is open and independent to all. Technology is radically changing the ways people work and reshaping the workplace itself. Equipped with powerful new mobility tools, employees today can work productively from virtually anywhere. Its growing potential to strengthen organizational performance has moved mobility from the sidelines to the mainstream of information technology. Organizations intent on maximizing corporate performance must incorporate mobility as a fundamental component of their strategic plans. However, the current innovation with the industry is driven more by the advancement in technology than by customers need. As further advances in mobile telephony are made, there will be natural demand for financial transactions via mobile devices.
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August 2011

BuyeRS PeRSPeCtIVe BuyeRS PeRSPeCtIVe

Bridging thegap between

Himanshu Goyal

Academia & Industry

Thought the Indian IT industry is growing by leaps and bounds, it is also facing distress due to the increasing skill gap, a main reason for which is the disconnect between academia and the industry itself. In a candid conversation with The Smarttechie, Himanshu Goyal, Country Manager - Career Education, Academic Initiative, DeveloperWorks & Globalization, IBM Software India/South Asia talks about IBMs initiatives targeted at university graduates.

There beats a heart of Dragon with in every Smart Device

The new buzz in mobility is all about smart devices smartphones and tablets. And mobile chipmaker Qualcomm is betting big on this newly emerged market with its Snapdragon platform. Dr. Sandeep Sibal, Country Manager and VP Business Development, Qualcomm India & South Asia talked about the platform, the opportunity and its plans for Indian market.
Sandeep Sibal

1.An insight into the growing gap between academia and real world industry needs. Today industry is looking for ready to deploy (or billable) job skills while Academia is building on theoretical and lab based (so called practical) skills. None of the two can compromise these focus areas as these are necessary part of learning and development of an individual. We at IBM are advocating a stronger focus on the curriculum with our approach of preparing Service Scientists. Today's Gen Y student, is a demanding young teen, who is a technologist, networker and a collaborator. When s/he has done education s/he can be a Call Center Operator, a blogger, sales executive, a techie, teacher or simply a service scientist. We are working with governments and private educationists to provide guidance to universities for building services research and new curriculum. Our ability to innovate depends on our ability to hire needed talent.

2. What are the sectors/areas where there is particularly a large knowledge/skill gap and why? All growing sectors including IT/ITES have a skill gap. If one looks purely at IT, we researched ten most popular job definitions and concluded that we do not produce as many ready-made skilled professionals with a best combination of theoretical and practical

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3. IBM Career Program: An insight into IBM's engagement with the academia. Currently 3.4 lakh Engineering (IT) students in India are produced every year under CS/IT. However, the lack of real world project exposure becomes an impediment for many of these students when they start their career. IT companies recruiting the talent are facing huge challenges as they have to spend considerable time and money to train the young talent pool. As Educator Karl Fisch puts it: We are currently preparing students for jobs that dont yet exist, using technologies that havent been invented yet, in order to solve problems we dont even know are problems yet. So, we need to be mindful of the changing needs of the industry.

skills. Some of these are - Software Quality Management, Application Development using Java, Embedded Systems Development, IT Service Management, Business Analytics Information Management, Enterprise Content Management, Business Process Management, IT Security, Social Software. We are working closely with select Educational Institutions and retail educational partners to fill these gaps and address such needs. Our Career Education Framework for Engineering and Business Schools addresses these gaps.

Career Education is one such initiative to enhance industry standard career skills to "Optimal Career". The whole framework is based on understanding three basic skills of an individual to Observe, Plan and Do. In IT job parlance we further extend their personality traits to areas of work they can engage in which includes Observer to Quality area, Planner to management area and a Doer to engineering area. IBM and NIIT have recently collaborated for Career Education Projects. This is to provide students with projects based on real-world requirements faced by organizations and are designed by experts at IBM. The students will develop these projects based on the methodology as practiced by the industry today. As part of this collaboration, NIIT will train and enable the students at its centers, providing them with the required skills training and mentoring throughout the project duration. IBM experts will evaluate the completed projects and provide certificates to successful students. On the business school side, we have a framework called Career Education in Business Transform (CEBT) under which we have offerings to train students on Business Analytics - predictive and descriptive, SSME, Social Marketing and SOA. This will enable the students across all streams of Finance, Marketing and Human Resource to get the real T-Shaped skills to do well in their careers.

Snapdragon Processors what is in store? There are many new Snapdragon processors ready to hit the market in next few months. The Snapdragon asynchronous dual and quad core family consists of the Snapdragon MSM 860. It features dual Scorpion CPU of 1.5GHz each, asynchronous cores, Adreno 220 GPU, HD 1080p capture and playback, Dolby 5.1, stereoscopic 3D capture and playback,

The market opportunity There are 40 million mobile Internet users in India. There is a strong demand for data from tier 2 and tier 3 cities. There are said to be 28 million Facebook users, of which, 30 percent are on mobile. About 20 photos uploaded every second, and mobile users are two times more active. Qualcomm has always boasted of unparalleled system integration and having this best-in-class asset is now a key advantage for the company. The benefits of integration include lower system costs, less engineering and faster time to market over 745 devices launched in fiscal 2010 have a smaller footprint (about 1020 percent smaller), and are power efficient (up to 35 percent better). Today over a 100 plus commercial devices have been announced by various players like Sony Ericcson, Samsung, Acer, HTC and more that will that use Snapdragon. There are said to be 200 plus more in design, and 30 companies with tablet designs are deemed underway. Snapdragon currently powers eight tablet models.

and a comprehensive range of 3G. The Snapdragon next gen Krait processor, expected to be launched in the last quarter of 2011, features next gen Krait architecture. Other features include single/dual/quad Krait CPU up to 2.5GHz, Adreno dual/quad GPU, full 1080p display support, stereoscopic 3D capture and playback, and an unparalleled range of 3G/4G. Qualcomm claims that the Snapdragon has superior CPU microarchitecture. In contrast, competitors push to achieve performance. The Adreno GPU provides a superior graphics performance with smooth, responsive, customized UI on multiple operating systems. There are hours of game play between charges due to superior mobile GPU architecture. As of now, Qualcomm is offering over 100 plus games on Snapdragon way more than any other platform. Snapdragon also enhances video quality and run time over Internet. The company is also the first to provide hardware acceleration for Flash and HTML5 videos first to provide inpage playback of HTML5 videos as well as stutter free flash video playback. We also have OS platform leadership. Over 60 percent of Android devices today are powered by Qualcomm. All Windows Phone devices launched are being powered by Snapdragon, as are the new webOS devices. Modem evolution and technology leadership In HSPA+, we have had 103 launches, 148 network commitments, and 13 multi-

carriers. As of August 2010, we have been offering DC-HSPA+ 42Mbps. In Rev A and B, we have 107 commercial networks with 33 percent growth year-onyear. There are seven KDDI Rev B devices. Qualcomm moved to EV-DO Rev B in Jan. 2010. In LTE, we have had 20 launches and have 208 network commitments, besides, 14 LTE TDD trials. Our presence in 4G LTE has been since November 2010 and Snapdragon advantages include purpose built CPU; Asynschronous dual core architecture; Best-in-class power consumption; unmatched system integration; widest OS platform support and more Road Ahead In India, Qualcomm Snapdragon has had sufficient traction, with six models launched during 2010 Acer Liquid, Sony Ericsson XperiaX10, HTC Desire, Acer Liquid Ferrari Edition, Dell Streak and HTC HD7. In 2011, as of May, we have 13 models launched HTC Mozart, HTC Desire HD, HTC Desire Z, Dell Venue, Dell Venue Pro, OliveSmartV-S300, Acer Liquid Metal, HTC Incredible S, Sony Ericsson Xperia PLAY, Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc, HTC Desire S, Acer Iconia Smart and Spice MI 410. Snapdragon in India in 2012 will likely be in high-end smartphones as well as tablets. These would coincide with the launch of 4G/LTE networks. The apps would include Augmented Reality, Movies on the go (Netflix), console quality gaming and stereoscopic 3D.
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August 2011

he chapter of web applications in Bangalore turned a new leaf on 16th of August at SiliconIndia WebApps 2011. The conference brought together web developers, designers, technology enthusiasts, innovators, vendors, and users to experience the future of Web Applications and the upcoming trends. The conference boasted of experienced and knowledge rich speakers who held the audience in awe with their erudition on Android. Customers are looking for solutions. The demand for upcoming webapps is such that they solve simple customer related problems in an efficient way, independent of technology or platform used to create it, said Amit Aggarwal, Co Founder and CTO from VIA who was officially present to give the key note on Trends in the Web space and new business models Janakiram MSV, Technology Evangelist, Amazon Web Services spoke on Building Powerful Web Applications in the AWS Cloud and provided with an introduction to the Amazon Web Services from a business and technical perspective. He emphasized on building a Simple LAMPbased web application in the AWS cloud and then apply all the attributes and latest features of the cloud to turn it into an Auto-scalable, highly available, highly scalable, fully-monitored edge-cached application that is not only easier to develop but also easier to maintain.
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Define-DevelopDeploy web ideas!!! @ SiliconIndia WebApps Conference 2011

EVENT

By Mohammad Faiz Ali

EVENT

By Divya Srinivasa

Android Camp, August16, 2011, Bangalore WebApps Conference, August 16, 2011, Bangalore

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Coming in next was Pronam Chatterjee, Staff Systems EngineervFabric SME, VMware who spoke on Spring, tcServer and Hyperic Build, Run and Manage lightweight J2EE web apps. He got the audience thinking by asking them questions like What do we mean by New Applications? What is new about applications and why does that mean we need a cloud application platform? Srinivas Bhagavatula, Program Architect from Mind Tree spoke on eCommerce webapp Architecture and Scalability The key to scalability is, to understand what it is, to keep principles simple, to clearly understand what is expected and to exploit system characteristics, he said. The young CEO of Tyto software, Narayan Raman spoke on Agile Web Application Testing Technologies and Solutions where the objective of his speech was to ensure Rapid feedback on the quality of software. Narayan emphasized that the problem with Web application testing is that there are many browsers, many operating systems, browsers have quirks and the browser technologies are evolving at an amazing pace. Speaking on Developing secure and high performance web applications, Dipankar Sinha, Infrastructure Head - Project Manager from Hungama.com elaborated that security is a never ending process and

works in a circle. Circle starts with development cycle Detection or Analysis of Weak links in code, fixing weak links, development cycle. Security is not only developers responsibility; its a joint effort of developer + infrastructure professional + QC/QA. Knowing is everything, if you know your enemy, you can take precaution. One need not become a hacker to prevent your company property from hackers. If you know in which scenarios hackers can gain access and can compromise your company property, that will increase chances of winning war against hackers by 50-80 percent and rest is how beautifully you can convert your knowledge to code, he said. Sudhir Rao, Brand Practice Manager Rational from IBM gave the closing session on Instrumented Interconnected & Intelligent Cloud. Our world is also going through the following three transformations: First, the world is becoming instrumented. Second, our world is becoming interconnected. Third, all of those instrumented and interconnected things are becoming. Intelligent, said Rao. One of the key capabilities that drives smarter planet is 'cloud computing Sudhir concluded. Amazon web services, VM ware, Mcgraw Hill, Rails Detective and VTU Alerts partnered together to make this event a successful one.

Android Camp 2011: Throwing Light on New Arenas of Android

he Android Conference 2011, organized by SiliconIndia exceeded expectations as the symposium gathered top flight developers and industry professionals across the Android spectrum for one day of networking and open discussions. The speakers lined were hands-on experts with real-world apps experience who knew what it takes to succeed in the mobile marketplace, and at Android conference they shared their knowledge, insights and best practices to make this the best platform for android lovers. The sessions brought together the leading minds of the Android field. The infotaining sessions reflected the knowledge and expertise of the speakers, who kept the knowledge hungry audience engaged throughout the day. The android conference kick-started with a session on What I Wish I Knew When Id started! by Rakesh Verma, Director, Nav Innovations, who focused on the beginners, and incepted the fundamentals of Android. Gururaj Krishnarao Parvati, Technical Director & Product Manager from Mindtree took on the rather controversial topic of Android pitfalls and delivered his points to perfection. His session established the fact that android still has a long way to go if it wishes to be counted outside of the phone market, and it cannot afford to be complacent. He spoke on issues not often spoken

about, like the malwares, the difficulty of updating the android process, and more. His session drew instantaneous applause, as did Preethams. Preetham Naik, Portfolio manager, SLAD Group TechnologyVenture Capital, spoke on The advantages of UIDAI-Aadhar based apps on Android and the emergence of the Android based micro-Transaction device. He also delivered a clear cut talk on which the application developer community could possibly leverage on. Avinash Birnale, Head, Technology Consulting group, Endeavour Software Technologies, shed some light on the features of Android that help ensure safety and security of Android applications by speaking on, Building and Deploying Safe and Secure Android Apps for the Enterprise The next session was on, Pricing Models for Android Enterprise Applications by Naga Chokkanathan, Director (R&D) from CRMIT who expressed his concern of the fun image that android was associated with, Even after these many years in the market, Android is still seen as a Fun operating system. There are multiple reasons for this misconception, but in the recent few quarters, lots and lots of smart phone manufacturers are adopting Android as their platform and that gives us a unique challenge - having a phone which takes care of both the fun and the business re-

quirements of a smart phone user The security of any application is the biggest issue and so the post lunch session was started by Dr. Subir Saha, CTO from IonIdea on Security Challenges in Mobile Apps, emphasized on the impact of security weaknesses on the android market. Gururaj Narayanan, Senior Project Manager, Teleca India, spoke on, Who Uses Android? Market Research, which focused on smart phone user`s attitude and behavior. He also discussed on whether an app should be free, adsupported, paid, or rely on virtual goods or other approaches to monetization. Ranjeet Shetye, Sr. Manager Engineering, Marvell, spoke on, Android Everywhere: From Reference Design to Mass Market and focused on end to end application of Android. The educative sessions were concluded with an informative session focused on independent developers by Samartha Nagabhushanam, CEO and Founder of SmartSky Wireless, Speaking on, Marketing for Independent Android Developers, which emphasized on optimization techniques that will work for marketing an own app inexpensively and wisely. The exhibitor of this awareness generating and knowledge packed Android conference were Mc Graw Hill professional, VTU alerts.com being the supporting partner.
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May 2011

The author is Director - Global Human Resources, UST Global

ENTREPRENEURSHIP

By Ajith Kumar B

Managing Superior Performance:

hat keeps your business leaders up in the mid night? - Performance, Productivity, Profitability! An organization cannot sustain in this highly dynamic and competitive market by compromising on any of these three attributes. While the organizations are striving to develop extraordinarily outstanding performing teams, they need to think about one important aspect of bringing up and sustaining performance Is your CEO committed for managing performance? This fundamental question will help the organization to understand the level of importance given to performance management in the organization. Needless to say, if you havent found an answer to this question, the other two attributes like productivity and profitability will definitely have a significant negative impact. Why do we think CEOs commitment and involvement are an absolute necessity in managing performance? It all starts from setting the goals at the organizational level cascading it to all levels in the organization, periodic reviews necessary modifications, and
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Your CEO can make the difference!

frequent feedback mechanisms. Its assumed that, line managers and human resources department will definitely be focusing on these performance management areas because they dont have an option. And doing it because they dont have an option, it will be for the sake of doing it which is ultimately not going to help the business. Mostly, this system is being considered as a yearly routine to provide feedback and appraisal ratings to the employees and also use this information for decisions on promotions, salary hikes, and more. The question here is how can you guarantee that the Line managers are committed to do or has the drive to do a proper performance management evaluation for their teams? It clearly points to the need of your CEO driving from the front to put pressure on his/her direct reports to manage performance by showing linkage of performance to productivity and profitability. Organizations definitely realize the fact that theyve got to stay top on competition by periodic improvement of performance and efficiency. Also, they do understand how performance

Ajith Kumar B

will influence productivity and profitability. Most of the organizations have got performance management system either internally developed or done with consulting help from outside. But do you think our managers realize that they have people responsibility of performance management which normally cannot be delegated? And therefore the question is can the CEO help in this transformation? Though we talk about it day in and day out, in reality, I dont think our Managers are keen on people management especially as it relates to performance management and its viewed as HR imposed people program that bears little relationship to a companys strategic and operational imperatives. Today, the system is viewed as a place to do only the appraisals during the year end and therefore has come to be seen as an HR activity. Ideally, it should be a tool which should be used to effectively manage performance. Managers should spend quality time in setting goals, monitor and review their team performance and giving performance feedback. Here, in many cases, they dont even set the Goals

and feedbacks are not given even at the year end. Also, most of the organizations and their CEOs are not keen in asking or reviewing people on performance management as the focus on reviews are mostly on numbers or delivery. As a result, people dont realize the importance of performance management. Ideally the business leadership should be reviewing their team about how effectively they manage the performance. We need to bring in the mindset change in people to ensure effective utilization of performance management system for delivering business results. I definitely think that the CEO can help bring in a massive change in mindset. CEO should continuously reiterate the message to his/her business leaders on their role in people management. We need to bring in the realization among each leader and manger that they have HR responsibility as part of their job which cant be delegated. This transformation can succeed only by the CEO getting personally involved in timely communication on its significance, helping his/her direct reports to realize their HR responsibility and make them committed to manage performance. The role of the CEO does not stop there. The maximum impact is created when the CEO role-models paying attention to the performance management system and process himself or herself. Any world class system which is not effectively used in its true sense will not help the business. And, it will remain as just another system for employees to spend time during year end for the sake of doing. As an HR professional with 20 plus years of standing, I have come to believe that most of the modern organizations have a fairly good performance management system in place and what we need is the commitment from top management, which in turn cascades to all other levels of management. HR has a

critical role to play in ensuring the effective and meaningful utilization on performance management system and also enabling the CEO or business leaders in managing performance. As a HR professional, you have got a critical role to play in this context. We have the responsibility to make the CEO and executive management realize how companies can transform themselves to achieve high and sustainable organizational performance. You should clearly articulate and show the clear linkage of performance management with productivity and profitability. You should be highly cautious with the key factors that influence performance changes in customer be-

havior, competitors moves, government actions, etc and provide key inputs to the executive management to take timely actions to modify the goals as may be appropriate. Needless to say that this demands HR professionals understanding of overall business. Unless and until you are equipped with the necessary understanding of business, you will have no say in enabling and driving CEO to ensure his involvement in managing performance. Another area where HR can partner with CEO or business leaders will be on identifying bottom performers to differentiate the performance. Ensure the bottom 10-15 percent understand that they did not perform to the level of rest of the population. This should bring employees competing for performance as no one would like to be in the bottom. Also, Managers should be happy to replace bottom performers with quality performers as it is going

Any world class system which is not effectively used in its true sense will not help the business. And, it will remain as just another system for the sake of having it

to improve their Business Units performance. This needs high level of executive leadership focus and change management which can be accomplished with effective HR partnership. In any organization, if they insist on managing performance in its true meaning, we the HR professionals, will definitely be able to make impact in the following ways Increase productivity by at least 20 to 30 percent from the current level. Identify top performers and effectively manage them to retain and engage Identify bottom performers - at least 10 to 15 percent in a year and

plan for improving their performance or replacing them with more competent and committed employees Establish direct correlation with business goals and employee goals whereby to achieve business targets successfully. The important message is that focusing on managing performance the capability of your organization in goal alignment, effective execution, modification of goals as needed faster than your competitors can is equally pertinent as focusing on other drivers of business performance. And its guaranteed the current productivity can be enhanced at least by another 20-30 percent and there by high profitability. If your CEO is committed to spend time in reviewing his/her leadership teams performance on the performance management, it will create wonders and I am sure it will automatically percolate down to all levels in the organization.
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August 2011

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August 2011

Attrition Blues: Myth & Reality

job-hopping behavior. In a hot market, this tendency or syndrome is even more heightened. Understanding this reality is helpful to manage our anxiety and often a desire to contain attrition. The Shock Theory: Lee and Mitchell researched into the causes of voluntary turnover and published their findings in the Human Resource Management journal (Fall-2005). Their findings reveal that job dissatisfaction contributes much less to the employee turnover than different kinds of shocks they experience from time to time. A shock is defined as a particular jarring event that initiates the intention to quit. The shock could be positive, neutral or negative, expected or unexpected, and internal or external. Typical examples are an unsolicited job offer, change in marital status, transfer to another location or company being subjected to a merger and the like. Lee & Mitchell examine four different paths that lead to employee quitting. Knowledge of this theory and how it works will be useful to understanding turnover in depth. Malis Law of returning Indian: With overseas job opportunities still commanding a lot of preference with knowledge workers, this law has its impact. Simply translated, this law implies: for every Indian working overseas returning to India, there is another Indian of the opposite sex accompanying back to overseas through the institution called marriage! This in effect means that whenever an Indian working overseas returns to India, expect one more to quit his or her job, get married and go back to find a job overseas! Lack of a progressive people

The author is Executive Vice President & Chief People Officer, Symphony Services. He can be reached at mahalingam.c@symphonysv.com

PEOPLE MANAGER

By C. Mahalingam

management process: Perhaps the most frequent cause of employee turnover, organizations seldom realize that they need to pay significantly more attention to how they coach managers to manage people and how they measure their performance against this responsibility. Corporate Leadership Council studies suggest that employees rarely trade off the manager quality for any other benefit including more money. This is so very evident but why many organizations do not do anything about getting this right remains a puzzle! Simple supply-demand situation: Given that there is a huge demand for professionals with deep domain knowledge and engineering principles and given that most organizations have challenge in planning and grooming people for the jobs (thanks to the very nature of the industry), organizations resort to easy (in reality very difficult!) path of hiring away from other firms. But then, this becomes a circus when everyone does this to everyone else! Now that we know, what can we do about this? The issue is not so much about achieving a zero attrition situation. This is unrealistic. And this was not the case even during the 2009 depression. Employees did move. Most organizations averaged around 6-8 percent attrition. We are talking about how we as managers can do our bit to control and contain attrition to a manageable level. Here are some thoughts I shared during the panel discussion: Become good at profiling employees @risk: Smart managers always knew that attrition is hardly a surprise. Normally, employees give away symptoms of disengagementloss of interest, withdrawal syndrome, dislike for travel, silence in meetings, change in dressing habits, becoming overcritical and cynical about almost anything and the like. We follow a 5-

P framework that has helped us to profile the employees at risk. This framework covers assessing the situation around the employees on following parameters / criteria: Performance: Employee performance levels, particularly noticeable dips

Common symptoms of employees disengagement are loss of interest, withdrawal syndrome, dislike for travel, silence in meetings, change in dressing habits, becoming overcritical and cynical about almost anything.
Penetration: on the salary band applicable to the employee grade, where is he or she now. Employees penetrated low will likely leave sooner than later Pressure: Pressure of work either caused by the manager or even by the clients. Prolonged pressure at work makes people seriously consider change Participation: Employee participation levels in organization-wide initiatives. Personal issues: Personal issues often trigger the desire to leave. Organizations can define their own framework for profiling employees who may be at risk. And once the profiling is done, managers have to engage with the employee at risk to fix the cause of the problem the sooner the better. Strengthen the internal job market: Yet another obvious tool that managers can leverage. It is an irony of sorts that most of us lose employees on grounds of better responsibilities

n the just concluded NASSCOM HR summit, I moderated a panel discussion on How much is too much when it comes to employee turnover. It evoked a lot of interest and provoked much different points of views at the event. As managers, all of us are obsessed with and worried about the invisible revolving doors we are battling with. The concern is real and for good reasons. Our on-time delivery and customer satisfaction depend a great deal on stable workforce. The cost of replacement is negatively impacting the not-so-high margins heavily. There is a general sense of helplessness on the part of all of us as managers. It is against this backdrop
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that the above Summit deliberated the issue at length. Opening the panel, I had a few key points and pointers to share. In a nutshell, these revolved around the following, not necessarily, anything out of the world though! The HOBO Syndrome: Way back in 1974, Dr Ghisseli researched the challenge of employee turnover and presented his findings in American Psychologist. He observed that there has been an increasing desire on the part of employees globally to change from one job to another. He termed this attitude and behavior as Hobo Syndrome. This simply is the tendency of employees to engage in

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elsewhere and we ourselves are constantly looking for people who can shoulder higher responsibilities. Companies like GE and IBM leverage internal talent before they explore bringing in external candidates. Sadly enough, organizations pay a price for some of their managers unrelenting to let their best folks go and work for another unit of business in their own company. And in the process, they end up losing the good employees to the competition. In good organizations, an important measure of promoting a manager is to assess them on how many of their team members were offered by them to other teams! Career Coaches: Employees do need a coach at work, especially those that are at cross roads on career issues. Identifying good managers and technical specialists with an aptitude for coaching and then training them in coaching processes will be very helpful. Coaches can help shape the aspirations of employees, guide them into making use of multiple opportunities that a growing organization always presents and clarifying career myths. Manager action trackers: It also pays to track the progress and effectiveness of the employee engagement interventions including communication initiatives such as one-on-ones, skip level meetings, round tables and the like. One of the most frequent comments from exiting employees is : if only my manager spent 10 percent of the time he spent after I put in my resignation before it is too late! Trackers help to measure how well some of the well-intentioned initiatives are implemented and provides senior managers with an opportunity to do course correction with their first-line managers. In the final analysis, attrition control may not be all that difficult. What makes it manageable is proactive action on the part of managers. Back to good old wisdom from grandma: A stich in time saves nine. Are managers listening?
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August 2011

TECH PRODUCTS Compiled by Hari Anil

NOKIA E6
NOW IN INDIA
Price: ` 18,679

VANGOGH X450 COMES WITH DOCKABLE

BLUETOOTH HEADSET
Price: ` 3,500

MICROMAX

Nokia expanded its E series smartphone range with a new addition, the E6. This phone has a touch screen in addition to its QWERTY keyboard. It has an internal memory of 8GB and this can further be expanded up to 32GB using MicroSD memory card. For connectivity, this 3G phone has a high speed

LOGITECH LAUNCHES NEW COOLING PAD,

Logitech introduces its latest energy-efficient Logitech Cooling Pad N200 in Indian market. This, USB powered virtually silent cooling pad, has a tilted fan with two fan speeds on and off switch, and a large grill. It has a front-lip bumper that keeps the laptop from sliding down and fits with any laptop up to 16 inches. The USB charger can be stored inside and it is designed for portability. It also has rear and side air intakes for steady, unobstructed airflow and comes with two years limited warranty.
Price: ` 1,595

N200

Bluetooth 3.0, and a micro USB connector. It operates on Symbian Anna operating system. E6 features an 8 megapixel camera with HD quality 720p resolution video recording capability and a front end secondary camera for video conferencing. The phone is available in black, grey, and silver.

VanGogh X450 is the latest dual sim phone from Micromax, which features a Dockable Bluetooth Headset. X450 sports a 2 inch QVGA display and a 2 megapixel camera with video recording. The entertainment options include multi format music player, video player, stereo FM

radio, and games. Its 1000mAh Li-ion battery gives four hours of talk time and up to 13 days standby time. For connectivity it has Bluetooth with A2DP, GPRS, and WAP. The phones internal memory can be expanded up to 8GB using MicroSD memory card.

MARATHON TABLETS
Bangalore based EAFT Technologies launches its new tablet, Marathon in Indian markets. The 10.1 inch tablet sports a unique 3D user interface and is powered by a NVIDIA Tegra 2 processor. It operates on Android 2.2 FroYo and supports Flash 10.1. The tablet comes with an internal memory of 16GB and is capable of 1080p HD video playback. Its connectivity options include 3G, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, USB ports and a HDMI port.
Price: ` 29,990

EAFT TECHNOLOGIES LAUNCHED

LENOVO IDEA CENTRE A320 ALL-IN-ONE COMES TO INDIA

Lenovo launches a new all-in-one in its IdeaCentre A Series, IdeaCentre A320. The 21.5 inch A320 features Intel Core i3 2310M processor with 2.1 Ghz speed and 3MB L2 Cache, is among the slimmest all-in-ones available in the country. It runs on Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium operating system. This All-in-One has a 4GB DDR3 RAM that can be expanded up to 8GB and 750GB hard disk. An External DVD writer is also included in the bundle. Wi-fi, Bluetooth, TV tuner with remote, wireless keyboard and mouse, USB3.0 and USB2.0 ports, and a 7-in-1 card reader are among other features of A320.
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SILICON POWERS

Price: ` 51,190

STREAM S20 USB 3.0

HARD DISK
Price: ` 4,320 - ` 5,620

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Silicon Power brings its portable hard drive Stream S20 to India. This USB 3.0 portable hard drive comes in four different models of 500GB, 640GB, 750GB and 1TB capacities. In USB 3.0 mode the device is capable of copying at 5 GB per second and 480 MB per second in USB 2.0 mode. Stream S20 needs DC 5V of power to function properly and is powered via USB. It supports operating systems including Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows 2000, Linux 2.6.31 or later, and MacOS 10.4 or later. The hard disk is presently available in Purple color and comes with three years warranty.
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August 2011

Set the BUG Right @ SofTec 2011 Bangalore

EVENT

By Nushin Naz

he testing community of Bangalore got together on August 2nd at the SofTec 2011 to discuss and address the latest issues, testing industry faces today. Important concepts such as Creating a high performance Testing & QA Team, Creating leaders in testing domain, Challenges and Growth Prospects for the Software Testing, were addressed by the top players, as the gathering of different verticals from testing

The concept was an instant hit with the dignitaries and attendees who believed that testing is far too universal to be limited to a few sectors. The SofTec 2011 had two parallel tracks: Test leadership & Test professional. Mukesh Jain, Principal Engineering Manager, Microsoft India R&D started the professional track with his session on Performance Improvement stories from Bing, Hotmail and MSN followed

Testing is not just about finding defects, it is about being constantly curious of how a system can used/abused and hence good questioning is key element for testers to deliver business valuehe said. T Ashok in his session on Houston - We have a problem! in the Test technical track mentioned that cleanliness criteria, enables expectations. To be clear and then be sharply focused on the goal of what types of defects to uncover

domain listened with rapt attention. The event was initiated with a key note on Paradigm Shift-Testing 3.0 by Arun kumar Singh, Vice President(Testing Services), Global IT business Wipro. Testing 3.0 envisages Testing graduating from technical excellence to assuring customer experience. There is a trend of the CIO reporting to CFO. In this situation, the value of testing will have to be presented in financial terms. The focus moves from 100% testing to the right amount of testing needed for the assurance One of the novel and exciting features of SofTec 2011 was the panel discussion on The Roadmap to Quality wherein QA Heads from Tata Beverages Percy Pavri, BIOCON Raghunandan H V, Mahindra Reva K. Umesh and STAG Software T Ashok got together to present their take on testing and quality assurance in their domain which reaffirmed the fact that testing is not only about finding bugs and fixing issues.
The Smart Techie

by Asvini Kumar, chairman and MD, Thinksoft Global who touched upon a very new concept of introducing a specialized curriculum that would answer the need of industry ready software testing professionals. 75% of the fledging graduates are unemployable, there is a need for financial sector and the Testing sector to collaborate and go all out and create a specialized curriculum including an on-the-job training framework leading to a Post Graduate Diploma in Financial Software Testinghe said Speaking on the topic of Cloud computing and software testing Anuj Magazine Software Testing practitioner from Citrix, held an absorbing talk. He elaborated on the fact that there are myriad low cost options available to move different aspects of Software testing to the cloud T Ashok, Founder & CEO, STAG software highlighted the importance of questioning in his session called Landscaping- The Science Of Questioning.

is the core of Hypothesis based testing. Emphasizing the importance of creating leaders Nagarajan Pichumani laid out 10 rules for the audience that would help them create high performance test teams. Vaidyanathan Ramalingam Director Engineering, Huawei used an unlikely analogy of a south Indian thali to explain to the audience the difference between waterfall testing and agile testing. Pradeep C, CEO of Edista Testing Institute engaged a highly interactive session on Workforce strategies for creating successful test organization, speaking about the event in high regards he said It was a well-organized event, and I sincerely enjoyed the interactionThe event saw an attendance of 600+ delegates, highly interactive Q&A rounds and networking of high caliber. This event was sponsored by STAG software, Softsmith, QAI, Thinksoft, Amitysoft, ITB, TYTO Software, Parasoft and

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August 2011

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