siliconindia

In My Opinion: Rajat Mohanty, Paladion Networks VC TALK: Dharmesh Thakker, Advanced Technology Ventures Mobile Special

PUBLISHED SINCE 1997

BUSINESS & TECHNOLOGY IN THE U.S. & INDIA AUGUST - 2010 SILICONINDIA.COM

Bobby Srinivasan, President & CEO

 siliconindia AUGUST - 2010
Contents August2010
Editorial
16
Publisher
Harvi Sachar

G
High Time to Re-examine! Cover Story
Editor-in-Chief
Pradeep Shankar
Managing Editor
Christo Jacob ROAMWARE
lobalization and outsourcing are the important elements of
any business in any country. Both globalisation and out-

R
Deputy Editors
Jaya Smitha Menon sourcing banks much on immigration for its success. But re-

uling
cently the immigration row is heating up in the U.S and European
Editorial Staff Union. To resolve this dispute in U.S, following the European Union
Anonya Roy Benny Thomas strategy by U.S may not hold good and should rightly align with the

Roaming Space
Binu T Paul Eureka Bharali U.S economical growth.
Gargi Sinha Juby Thomas For instance, recent President Obama’s battle to block a con-
the
Kukil Bora Pragyan Acharya troversial new immigration law aimed at driving more than
By Christo Jacob

Roshna Sankar Vimali Swamy 400,000 undocumented workers out of the state of Arizona is rais- Bobby Srinivasan
ing difference of opinion in the state. It is said that nearly half the
Sr.Visualizer Raghu Koppal U.S. population wants immigration to slow down. But will the
Subscription Manager P Magendran slow down really help U.S? The answer is the state should know
to separate wheat from the chaff. 06 [In My Opinion] 26 [Technology] 38 [Technology]
The U.S is home to about 1.6 million Indian origin people, mak- Tortoises Do Not Win in Mobile Space at the Cusp Opportunistic Computing A
Mailing Address ing them the third-largest immigrant group in the country after Mex- Market Places of Revolution New Paradigm
icans and Filipino. Compared to other immigrant groups, the Indian By Rajat Mohanty, By Rajiv Kumar, Rocketalk By Mohan Hebbar,
SiliconIndia Inc foreign born are much better educated -- nearly three-quarters of In- Paladion Networks Symphony Service
44790 S. Grimmer Blvd dian-born adults have a bachelor's degree or higher. Now Indians adds
28 Doing IT Services Business
Suite 202, to the credits innovating and playing a great role in the U.S. in all
fields, whether it be business or research. For instance, recent Guru-
08 [Infocus] with SMBs and Startups 40 [Management]
Fremont, CA 94538 By Prathapan Sethu, QBurst How Shared Services and
raj Daeshpande’s appointment as the Co-Chairman of U.S. President
Barack Obama’s National Advisory Council on Innovation and En- 12 [VC Chakra] Business Service
T:510.440.8249, F:510.440.8276 California Based Zenprise 30 Mobile Productivity in the Management Help You
trepreneurship and Gunjan Sinha, SiliconIndia Chairman and the Ex-
ecutive Chairman of Metricstream representing the Board of U.S - Raises $9 Million Enterprise Deliver Increased Value to
India Endowment for Science and Technology is a recent testimony Mavenir Systems Raises By David D’Souza, Moprise Your Customers
to the fact the contribution of Indian origin people cannot be ignored. $13.6 Million By Bill Emmet & Atwell
It is one of the idiosyncracies of the neo-liberal New World Order 32 Best Practices in Designing
siliconindia that while there is a free trade in finances, goods, and services, the Mobile Applications
Williams, BMC Software
July 2010, volume 13-08 (ISSN 1091-9503)
policy on immigration is still not matching the trade policies. While 14 [CEO Spotlight]
Published monthly by siliconindia, Inc.
slamming the door shut in the face of many desperate economic Harness the Power of By Y K Maheshwari, Mphasis 42 [Entrepreneur 101]
refugees is fine, it should not be at the cost of devastating the most ed- Collaboration Designing a Winning
ucated, most skilled workers from the same countries, many of whom Unified Communication: It’s Time 34 [Business] Organizational Culture
have played a crucial role in the economical growth of the U.S. Back Office Systems Take
To subscribe to siliconindia for Alternative Solutions By Gunjan Sinha
Visit www.siliconindia.com or send email to While a huge immigration row leads to tightening immigration Center Stage in Driving
subscription@siliconindia.com laws, to the flipside these are the countries that proclaim to other world
22 [VC Talk] Consumer Experience 44 [CIO Profile]
Copyright © 2009 siliconindia, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction to leverage on ‘Globalization’. Now it’s high time to get into action Investment Trends The By Neeraj Vyas, Aricent ‘Technology Will Always be
in whole or part of any text, photography or illustrations without writ-
and re-examine U.S. immigration policies to determine whether they Subservient to Business”
ten permission from the publisher is prohibited.The publisher assumes
are moving in the right direction and strike a right balance between Evolution of ‘Tech’ in 36 [Management]
no responsibility for unsolicited manuscripts, photographs or illustra-
By Vimali Swamy
tions. Views and opinions expressed in this publication are not neces-
sarily those of the magazine and accordingly, no liability is assumed by
globalization and barring the potential people who can drive the U.S Cleantech Business Emerges from Behavior
economical growth. By Dharmesh Thakker, Advanced
the publisher thereof.
While Behavior from Beliefs 46 [SI 20 Profile]
Technology Ventures
siliconindia’s circulation is audited and certified By Juby Thomas
by BPA International. siliconindia is available through
mainstream retail outlets such as Barnes & Noble, Borders, and Please do share your thoughts with us.
Christo Jacob
Tower Records. It is also available at ethnic Asian Indian stores in
major Indian hot spots across the U.S.The magazine is also dis-
tributed at major trade shows and conferences, including Comdex, Internet
Managing Editor
|5|
World and PC Expo.
editor@siliconindia.com siliconindia August 2010
 By Rajat Mohanty
The author is CEO and Co-Founder,
Paladion Networks
in my
opinion
Tortoises
M
Do Not Win
in Market Places
ine has been a rela-
tively short journey as
an entrepreneur so
far. It’s been just over
a decade since we
started our company specializing as a
niche information security player. One
of my key learnings in this short span
has been on the need to evolve business
models with time. In my opinion, the
relationship between business models
and time is a less discussed subject in
management studies. Fledgling entre-
preneurs could do well by understand-
ing the dynamism between the two.
Almost all successful businesses alter
the initial models created during their
startup phases. And what’s more inter-
esting is that they keep changing their
models even as they succeed with the
existing model, suggesting that firms
should adopt a very active approach in
pursuing business model changes.
Young companies should constantly
ask ‘how do we innovate our business
model, which is still contributing rev-
enues and profits’, since future effec-
tiveness of this is likely to be
siliconindia
|6|
August 2010
find similarity between what we were
even five years ago and where we are
today. Ten years ago, when we started
our company, we were ahead of the
markets in our part of the world. In-
formation security was in very nas-
cent stages then. That gave us the
initial momentum and business suc-
cess as we could take a unique posi-
tioning of security specialists in the
market. But soon many established IT
players entered the domain along
with a crowd of startups competing
with us, and we quickly realized that
to continue our success we will need
to keep changing what we are doing
and somehow stay ahead of the mar-
ket. It helped that information secu-
rity was a dynamic and fast evolving
field and a company that can contin-
uously evolve will get a premium in
the market. Without going into
specifics of what we did, I have tried
to generalize the learnings we have
had as a team:
Intuition is an important ally of
Fledgling entrepreneurs. I have already said
that business models should be vary-
ing with time. The most common
entrepreneurs could do
well by understanding view is that it should adapt to envi-
ronmental changes. But environmen-
the dynamism and tal changes are often ambiguous and
relationship between young companies do not have the
reach and resources to monitor such
business models and changes. Also young companies need
to be ahead of changes so that they
can compete with more established
time, which is a less
discussed subject in companies. In this scenario where
lack of data is coupled with the need
management studies to be predictive, intuition often is the
only thing going for an entrepreneur.
undermined by changes in its ex- By intuition, I don’t mean an eureka
ternal environment or competi- moment or path-breaking idea but
tion? more sedate gut feel on what we
We started out as a focused should incrementally change or do
information security player and differently for being ahead in market.
even today we call ourselves a Such intuition often comes from an
focused information security entrepreneur’s cognition of environ-
player. Does that mean that we mental threats and opportunities
are the same company that we based on whatever limited interac-
were 10 years back? On the tions with market participants are
contrary, looking back it
Rajat Mohanty
there as well as from own internal
will be difficult for me to beliefs and influences.
Often young
companies tend to go
directly from idea to
the scaling up stage
without carrying out
small experiments on
validation of business
models, which are
quite essential
Trial and error experiments should
back up the intuition based decisions.
In my experience, it’s very easy to fall
in love with an idea if it is based on
one’s own beliefs and concepts. Bas-
ing the change of business model on a
narcissist devotion to own idea, with-
out the backing of market data and
analysis, will only decrease the firm’s
chances of survival. Not only can the
market acceptance be a problem but
also the inertial pressures within the
firm to preserve status quo can defeat
any new initiative. We are not talking
of creating a new business model be-
cause the earlier model is a failure and
company is struggling for survival,
wherein any change is accepted inter-
nally as better than the status quo.
Here we are talking of a scenario
where the business model change is
more proactive to ensure continued
success and hence can face internal in-
ertia in a firm. Again, young compa-
nies do not have the luxury of market
research and consumer analysis to get
data for backing the new model. This
is where the most tried and true meth-
ods of problem solving lies, trial and
error method comes in. Despite its
lack of sophistication, sometimes it’s
the most efficient choice as it always
guarantees a learning. I feel there are
five stages for a young firm to carry
out trial and error experiments. It ob-
viously starts with idea formulation
which may have been from intuition.
Before falling in love with the idea,
the idea needs to be validated from
market. It is best done by trying out
the idea on limited scale with few well
wishing customers or prospects. If
there is a validation that the idea is
likely to appeal to a significant section
of target market, only then the firm
moves to next level of business model
creation. This is where the details of
how the offering will be delivered,
pitched, and priced are drawn up.
There may be multiple models around
the same idea. Small experiments need
to be carried out to again test each
business model with few customers or
prospects. Only after the business
model that makes most sense is identi-
fied, the company moves to the final
stage of scaling up. Very often young
companies tend to go directly from
idea to scaling up stage without carry-
ing out small experiments on valida-
tion of business models.
Intuition works best when people
have the mindset to follow through on
their beliefs but still retain a good deal
of skepticism on what they know, so
that they are always looking for any
contradictory evidence. The small trial
and error experiments on idea valida-
tions and business models validations
help in collecting evidences. Once a
decision is made on changing the busi-
ness model, the thing that matters the
most is time. There should be single
minded focus on scaling up. This is
where the company can put all the re-
sources at its disposal to push the busi-
ness model forward. Running fast is
the mantra at this stage.
It is obvious that the above process
is iterative. Successful young compa-
nies will keep evolving new business
models or tweaking existing models
and execute them faster before others
catch up. It’s not about only being
faster but also about not being com-
placent with existing model, which
may be successful today but may fade
out tomorrow. It’s not the tortoise who
wins that you have to look at but the
hare that loses once it becomes com-
placent needs to be a lesson. si
siliconindia
|7|
August 2010
in
W
India to Make Headway in Education
with Low Priced Laptops
ith an aim of equipping
every Indian student with a
laptop, the Human Re-
source Development (HRD) ministry’s
effort to bring out $30 laptops has in-
vited lot of criticism. Some of the In-
dian media channels bring excitement
to the whole scenario by calling it as
India’s yet another cheapest invention
after designing the world’s cheapest
passenger car Tata Nano.
On the flipside, the western media
is hesitant to call it as a laptop, “It
doesn’t appear to be a laptop at all, in-
stead, it seems to be a small (10 inches
by 5 inches) ‘storage device’ with a
bunch of wires emerging from it,” re-
ports Gizmodo. Whether it is $10, $20
or $30 all of them are doubtful about
its success.
Until now, the China-based elec-
tronic equipment manufacturer MenQ
holds the credit for world’s cheapest
laptop EasyPC E790. India is trying to
V
Do You Get Electricity from Rice Husk? Bihar Does it
illages in Bihar have been
lifted out of darkness with an
uninterrupted, self sufficient
power supply and the credit for this ini-
tiative goes to Gyanesh Pandey, the
promoter of Husk Power Systems
(HPS) that transforms piles of dis-
carded rice husk to light up the villages.
Partnering with his friends Ratnesh
Yadav, Manoj Sinha, and Charles W
Ransler, Pandey has established ‘green’
power plants in 120 villages across
Bihar and 3 villages in Uttar Pradesh.
After research and experiments, the
team decided that the most feasible way
to provide power to the villagers who
depended on agriculture would be to
generate electricity from rice husk.
siliconindia
|8|
August 2010
break credit ts by bringing out the
$30 laptop with key features like
touch screen display, built in key-
board, 2GB RAM, Wi-Fi connec-
tivity, and USB support, and which
runs on solar power besides con-
ventional power sources and supports
multimedia, Web conferencing, and
Linux OS.
In 2009, MenQ launched $80 lap-
top successfully. But it took one year
for India to unveil a prototype of $30
laptop. The availability and distribu-
tion is the major concern of the hour.
Now Intel India has taken a step for-
ward and plans to partner with the
union HRD ministry to commercially
roll out the $30 laptop for students.
India has witnessed similar projects
in the past, but there has been no
progress other than the initial hue
and cry.
It should be noted that in 2005,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Through this unique green technology,
villages get uninterrupted power for up
to 6-12 hours by setting up a plant,
which burns rice husk to generate gas
to run generators.
“Becoming an entrepreneur was an
evolutionary process. I had a good life
in America. I did not face any problems
there, but I always had the feeling that
I must do something for our villages. I
do not feel as though I have made any
sacrifice. Today, there is hardly any-
thing I do other than work. It gives me
the satisfaction no other job can ever
give,” says Pandey who feels that
India’s acute power crisis must be
solved efficiently with renewable re-
sources.
(MIT) developed a similar prototype
of a $100 laptop, especially for chil-
dren of developing nations. But, at that
time, India rejected the offer, saying it
was too expensive, and decided to de-
velop a cheaper alternative of its own.
In 2008, the Indian Institute of Science
in Bangalore and the Indian Institute
of Technology - Madras worked on the
development of the low-cost laptop as
a part of the OLPC project.
There was certainly a distinct lack
of enthusiasm on the part of the gov-
ernment agencies in India towards the
idea of OLPC and MIT projects. The
$30 laptop initiative should not be a
repetition of OLPC & MIT projects.
After resigning his job in the U.S.,
Pandey returned to his home state in
2007, as his idea was to provide
power to villagers who depended on
agriculture as their main occupation
in a cost-effective and environmen-
tally-friendly manner.
The company is set to make prof-
its by the end of this year and plans
to light up villages in other states like
Maharastra, West Bengal, Uttar
Pradesh, and Tamil Nadu. Providing
electricity to villages across India is
just the beginning of Pandey’s ambi-
tious plan to transform rural India.
The company has already taken up
the initiative to educate 200 children
from Tumkuha. si
Deshpande on Obama Panel to
I
Support Innovation Strategy
ndia-born Gururaj Deshpande, Chair-
man of the Bangalore-based Tejas Net-
works, A123, and Akshaya Patra, once
said, “India is a land of limitless potential,”
and he is now proving it just right. The
man who has to his credit taking three
multi-billion-dollar companies public and
once the richest Indian origin man in the
world is now again adding feathers to his
crown. Despande, popularly known as
‘Desh’ is now appointed as the Co-Chair-
man of U.S. President Barack Obama’s
National Advisory Council on Innovation
and Entrepreneurship.
Desh will support Obama’s innovation
strategy by helping to develop policies that
foster entrepreneurship, create jobs, and
drive economic growth. He is one of the
26 members of the Council, which counts
serial entrepreneurs, university presidents,
investors, and non-profit leaders among its
members and the only Indian co-chairing
the Council, with the other Co-Chairs
being Steve Case, Chairman and CEO of
Revolution and co-founder of AOL, and
Mary Sue Coleman, President of the Uni-
versity of Michigan. Commenting on his
new role, Desh says, “The U.S. spends ap-
proximately $60-70 billion a year on re-
search, and I would be looking at ways to
get more out of that.”
Deshpande is an entrepreneur and phi-
lanthropist who serves as a member of the
MIT Corporation and has contributed
around $20 million to make possible
MIT’s Deshpande Center for Technologi-
Gururaj Deshpande cal Innovation. The Deshpande Founda-
tion is one of the leading philanthropic
foundations in the areas of innovation, en-
trepreneurship, and international develop-
ment. Through its grants, the foundation
has helped launch innovative companies,
assisted non-government organizations de-
velop an international presence, and
in
launched partnerships with some of the
most remarkable change agents in the
world today.
Born in Hubli, Karnataka, Deshpande
graduated in electrical engineering from
the Indian Institute of Technology -
Madras, and went to Canada to do his
master’s degree and PhD. He used to be
an academic before a fellow professor got
him into the world of business. Since
1981, Deshpande has started and taken
public three multi-billion-dollar compa-
nies including A123 Systems, which de-
buted well on Nasdaq. Now the challenge
for Deshpande will be to divide his time
equally between each of his not-for-profit
initiatives and his six businesses - Sand-
stone Capital, Sycamore Networks, A123
Systems, HiveFire, Tejas Networks, and
Airvana Inc. He is the chairman of the first
five and an investor in the last one.
“Many Indians based in the U.S. today
are involved in innovation and entrepre-
neurship, and the future of the world de-
pends on this. The key learning that
emerged from the work that I had been en-
gaged in, particularly at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT), was that I
need not only innovate, but also to connect
innovative ideas to markets, to create im-
pact by getting thinkers involved with rel-
evant ideas,” says Deshpande.
The 61 year old Desh believes in
mentoring his son Pawan at his startup
Hive Fire to dream big. Today, Desh-
pande does not need another claim to
fame. Nevertheless, his brother-in-law is
N R Narayana Murthy. Since 2000, Desh-
pande and his wife have been involved in
several non-profit initiatives that include
support for MIT, IIT, TiE, Akshaya Patra
Foundation, Public Health Foundation of
India, and the Social Entrepreneurship
Sandbox in Hubli. si
siliconindia
|9|
August 2010
in
T
9 Indian Think Tanks to Get $9 Million
he Think Tank Initiative has se-
lected nine Indian think tanks or
independent policy research in-
stitutions to receive $9 million to
strengthen their roles as influential
players in national policymaking. This
is an initiative by the Canada-based In-
ternational Development Research
Center (IDRC), the William and Flora
Hewlett Foundation, and the Bill &
Melinda Gates Foundation to encour-
age those institutions engaging in pol-
icy research focusing on national,
social, and economic issues. Each
think tank will receive long-term fund-
ing, enabling them to conduct research
that is fundamental to the development
of sound policy.
The Indian institutions chosen in-
clude Centre for Budget and Gover-
nance Accountability (CBGA), Centre
C
India Ranked 9th Most Attractive Investment Destination
limbing four notches up, India
has been ranked the ninth most
attractive investment destina-
tion in 2009 with a total foreign direct
investment inflow of $34.61 billion.
India attracted sizeable overseas in-
vestment despite the overall drop in
such inflows due to the global finan-
cial crisis, said the World Investment
Report-2010, which was prepared by
the United Nations Conference on
Trade and Development (Unctad).
The report noted, “If the situation
continues to improve, India is likely
to be among the most promising in-
vestor home countries in 2010-2012,
as well as the third highest economy
for foreign direct investment in 2010-
2012.”
Rashmi Banga, a Senior Econo-
mist at Unctad says, “In 2008, though
India attracted higher foreign direct
siliconindia
|10| August 2010
for Policy Research (CPR), Centre for
the Study of Developing Societies
(CSDS), Indian Institute of Dalit Stud-
ies (IIDS), Institute of Economic
Growth (IEG), National Council of
Applied Economic Research
(NCAER), Institute of Rural Manage-
ment Anand (IRMA), Public Affairs
Centre (PAC), and Centre for Study of
Science, Technology, and Policy
(CSTEP).
The Initiative received over 300
proposals from a wide range of Latin
American and South Asian think tanks
that focus on broad national, social,
and economic policy issues. Following
a thorough and rigorous review
process, 28 institutions were selected
from seven countries in Latin America
- Bolivia, Ecuador, El Salvador,
Guatemala, Honduras, Paraguay, and
investment worth $40.42 billion, its
ranking was lower at 13th. China
nudged further up to second position
at $95 billion from a third place last
year.”
The U.S. remained the top invest-
ment destination with inflows of $130
billion in 2009, followed by China,
France, Hong Kong, Britain, Russia,
Germany, Saudi Arabia, India, and
Peru, and five countries in South Asia
- Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan,
and Sri Lanka.
The Think Tank Initiative aims to
support local think tanks to produce
high-quality research that will improve
policies and, ultimately, contribute to
more equitable and prosperous soci-
eties. The $35 million investment in
Latin America and South Asia follows
$30 million in grants to 24 think tanks
in East and West Africa in 2009.
“International donors continue to
invest in policy research undertaken by
western institutions and sometimes for-
get that it is strong local think tanks
that often generate the most effective
policymaking in developing coun-
tries,” says David Malone, President of
Canada’s International Development
Research Center.
Belgium. Total inflows amounted to
$1.11 trillion, against 1.77 trillion in
2008. In 2009, Indian firms and funds
also invested a lower amount of
$14.89 billion overseas, compared to
$18.4 billion in 2008. “But such out-
flows are expected to rebound in
2010, sustained by merger and acqui-
sition opportunities associated with
Indian and Chinese firms’ persistent
pursuit of natural resources and mar-
kets,” the report says.
The report also revealed that five
Indian companies figured in the list of
top 100 non-financial trans-national
corporations, ranked by their foreign
assets overseas. Among them Tata
Steel was ranked 15th, the state-run
Oil and Natural Gas Corporation in
the 20th position, Hindalco in 29th
rank, Tata Motors in 40th position,
and Suzlon in 54th.
$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
Z
California Based Zenprise Raises $9 Million
enprise, a provider of enterprise
mobile management and device
management software com-
pany, has secured $9 million in new
funding. The round was led by the
Menlo Park based Rembrandt Venture
Partners with participation from the
existing investors, including Ignition
Partners, Bay Partners, Mayfield, and
Shasta Ventures. The funding is part of
a fourth round of funding raised a year
ago. To date, the company has raised a
total of $40 million. Zenprise, led by
Jayaram Bhat, will use the investment
to expand its sales and marketing ef-
forts as well as to fuel research and de-
velopment activities.
Based in Fremont, California, Zen-
prise offers tools for IT departments to
P
Mavenir Systems Raises $13.6 Million
ardeep Kohli founded
Mavenir Systems has re-
cently secured $13.6 mil-
lion in a fourth round of funding
from North Bridge Venture
Partners, Austin Venture, Alloy
Ventures, Greenspring Associ-
ates, and Cisco. Mavenir has
raised a total of $65 million
since its inception in 2005. The com-
pany plans to use the funding to attract
more top-tier mobile operators. Their
current customers include MetroPCS, a
provider of no-contract wireless serv-
ices, and the Wisconsin-based wireless
company Cellcom.
Richardson based Mavenir pro-
vides mobile convergence applications
and solutions to mobile operators.
Mavenir’s convergence solutions can
quickly deploy and allow mobile oper-
siliconindia
|12| August 2010
manage their team’s smart-
phones. Founded in 2003, Zen-
prise provides
service-management software
that delivers automated diag-
nosis and resolution of prob-
lems across the Microsoft
Exchange and BlackBerry en-
vironment. Currently, the company
has over 300 customers including
Boeing, Comcast, and Vodafone. The
company has seen 175 percent in-
crease in its revenue during the first
quarter of 2010.
The sheer volume and complexity
of employee-owned and corporate-is-
sued smartphones entering the enter-
prise is driving the demand for
Zenprise’s MobileManager software.
ators to offer new voice and
messaging services without
building new infrastructure.
The company enables serv-
ice continuity across wired
and wireless networks, al-
lowing carrier customers to
get consistent service on
Pardeep Kohli multiple personal devices.
With its technologies, a customer can
use a single phone number to receive
calls on both mobile and landline
phones. The company offers solution to
route a customer’s call through a wire-
less network, office PBX system, or
4G, depending on a customer’s physi-
cal location.
Mavenir’s Converged Voice and
Messaging solutions provide LTE op-
erators with a fast, cost-effective mi-
gration path to IP Multimedia
“The use of consumer-
friendly smartphones in
large companies has surged
in the past year or so, espe-
cially with the addition of
business and security fea-
tures to the iPhone. Venture
Jayaram Bhat capitalists are looking to
jump on this trend too, and that is why
they approached Zenprise, even
though the company was not planning
to raise more money at the time,” says
Bhat, CEO, Zenprise.
Zenprise’s extensive list of more
than 300 customers is globally spread
across different verticals like con-
sumer services, government organi-
zations, healthcare, legal, and oil and
gas firms.
Subsystem (IMS), which is a key com-
ponent for One Voice.
“Our growth potential in a $40 bil-
lion mobile infrastructure industry,
driven by the entire network transfor-
mation to 4G has played a key role in
drawing VC interest towards us,” says
Pardeep Kohli, President and CEO,
Mavenir Systems. The company is
gaining traction in the Mobile IMS
market and is competing with network
and system integrators and legacy net-
work vendors. “But we look at our
competitors as potential partners for the
next generation solutions offered by
Mavenir. We can compete as well as
complement them with some new in-
novative solutions,” explains Kohli.
With its 165 member team, the com-
pany is aiming high to grab a fair share
of the market. si
 CEO
spotlight
Harness the Power of Collaboration
As organizations begin to explore the possi-
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tial of Unified Communications (UC), one
will see more convergence with public col-
laboration tools, social media, and other Web
2.0 applications. In practice, it is rare that only
one UC suite is used exclusively, even after
an organization has standardized on a single
platform such as Microsoft OCS or IBM
Lotus at the same time. The enterprise archi-
tecture will more likely include a combination
Kailash Ambwani of authorized applications such as a specific
is the CEO of public IM and Skype, which will remain in
FaceTime use, no matter what UC platform is deployed.
Communications. Users are already driving the change,
The company whether the business likes it or not. Use of
enables the safe collaboration tools such as Twitter and
and productive use
LinkedIn, alongside enterprise UC platforms
of Unified within the workplace now account for a sig-
Communications nificant portion of new business opportunities
and Web 2.0. for many organizations. As take up increases
this trend is expected to expand significantly
Unified Communication: It’s Time for
Alternative Solutions
The change in the communications sector has
been remarkable in the past 5 years. The major
reason for this is convergence of devices, i.e.
unified communication driven by the new
generation of smartphones, Internet tablets,
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siliconindia
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and the line between UC and Web 2.0 blur, it
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 COVER STORY
ROAMWARE
R the
Quick Facts
Founded: 2000
President & CEO: Bobby Srinivasan
Headquarters: San Jose, CA
Other Offices: Amman, Brussels,
Bangalore, Dublin, Hong Kong,
uling
Johannesburg, Mumbai, New Delhi and
Singapore
Headcount: 374
Global Customer Base: 464 Mobile
Operator Networks, Banks and
Financial Institutions
Customer Footprint: 154 Countries
Investors: Shelter Capital, Primera
Capital, Doll Capital and Accretive
Vertical: Mobile
Website: www.roamware.com
siliconindia
|16| August 2010
Roaming Space
‘A
By Christo Jacob
ction is eloquence’ and Bobby Srinivasan, President and
CEO, Roamware is proving it just right by showcasing
India not only capable of body shop business but also can
be armed to build smart global product company. Srini-
vasan, who left India in 1985 to pursue higher studies,
had always dreamt of building a world class product completely out of
India that could transform lives of billions globally. It was this passion
and sheer belief that helped him align his thoughts during the initial
years of founding Roamware. The mantra worked well, with Roamware
entrenched as the global leader in voice and data roaming solutions and
a leading provider of mobile financial services. The company’s compre-
hensive suite of technologies and services helps operators globally to
make mobile roaming better and easier.
Now Srinivasan has a reason to be pleased with roaming revenues
forecasted to grow to $146 billion by 2011 . Founded in 2001, currently
Roamware’s products are deployed in over 464 mobile operator networks
across 154 countries and its services available to over three billion mobile
users globally. Additionally, Roamware’s mobile finance solutions have
been successfully deployed by major banks and operators around the
world, and serves a wide range of needs across the domains of mobile
commerce, banking, remittances and payments. “For nearly a decade, we
have successfully nurtured and grown this business —- despite the chal-
Bobby Srinivasan
lenges of global sales, delivery and support across diverse markets, e global
events including wars, global pandemics like SARS and the financial
meltdown in 2008-2009,” says Srinivasan.

“Roamware’s strategy from the in-
ception has been to play the role of
the preferred strategic partner on
the roaming business front for mo-
bile operators globally and this phi-
losophy is the fundamental
reason for our
success and
widespread
adoption of our
solutions in the
world
market.”
Abraham Punnoose, VP – Global
Marketing & Business Development
He could achieve this only because
he envisioned the business to be global
in nature at its inception. Srinivasan en-
sured that the senior management al-
ways had the appropriate DNA required
to challenge the Roamware team in
building world class products. This phi-
losophy of the company has cracked the
so called misconception of building your
initial business within 10 miles from
where one lives. With his chin up, Srini-
vasan proudly says “Today we are oper-
ating across 154 countries, serving over
460 mobile operator networks around
the world.”
Bee in the Bonnet
No matter where the customers are lo-
cated, mobile operators need to drive
down the costs associated with their
businesses. Current roaming trends have
resulted in decreasing revenues, declin-
ing margins and fierce operator compe-
tition. Moreover today telecom
operators could lose up to 10 percent of
roaming revenues because of quality is-
sues. According to a recent industry re-
port, an average of 39 percent of all
mobile calls falls below the industry
minimum standard for voice quality.
Given that roamers represent a profitable
customer segment, the implications of
poor quality of service include lost
roaming revenues and potential churn.
New regulations, roaming price reduc-
tions, stiff competition and a sharp rise in
siliconindia
|18| August 2010
data roaming traffic are some of the key
drivers forcing operators to search for
innovative business solutions to in-
crease traffic, drive usage, optimize
costs, and meet their goals.
“Roamware’s strategy from the incep-
tion has been to play the role of the pre-
ferred strategic partner on the roaming
business front for mobile operators glob-
ally and this philosophy has been the
fundamental reason for the success and
widespread adoption of our solutions in
the world market,” says Abraham Pun-
noose, VP – Global Marketing and
Business Development ,Roamware .
Old-fashioned, bilateral relation-
ships among Mobile Network Operators
(MNOs) are no longer sustainable as
they require massive manpower, signif-
icant costs and an inordinate amount of
time. Established MNOs have spent 10-
15 years setting up 400 to 500 roaming
agreements in place with contract / rela-
tionship management departments in
charge of bilateral roaming relationships.
It’s a timescale and a workforce alloca-
tion that definitely does not fit at all in
new entrants’ requirements in terms of
time to market and operational effec-
tiveness. If MNOs continue to follow the
traditional model, it would be a tremen-
dous waste of energy in negotiating hun-
dreds of bilateral agreements, energy
that instead might be better utilized o
promoting their own core business.
Once the roaming relationships are set
up, the daunting task for operators is to
leverage these agreements and garner in-
cremental market share and consequent
revenues and profit.
To address these challenges, one of
the earliest solutions from, Roamware
was the innovative Roaming Replicator
solution that would reduce go to market
timelines for a full fledged roaming of-
fering in under 12 weeks. Built in a
modular way, the suite of roaming solu-
tions reduce the overall complexity, pro-
vide operators with powerful technology
solutions to address business challenges
and enable them to focus on the end-cus-
tomer instead of inter-operator relation-
ships. Today, Roamware is the pre-
ferred and primary solution provider of
roaming solutions for the majority of tier
1 mobile operator’s inlcuding AT&T, T
Mobile, Orange, Airtel, Maxis, Etisalat
and Vodafone globally and this trust is
further reflected in joint hubbing initia-
tives with some of the major mobile op-
erator companies across regions.
“Our business model is a blend of
software license, transactional revenue,
revenue share and managed services re-
sulting in a robust and predictable rev-
enue model with recurring revenue
constituting 30 percent of company’s
revenues. By 2012, recurring revenue is
expected to touch 50 percent of overall
revenue. The global footprint and market
penetration ensures that there is no rev-
enue concentration in any region or se-
lect customers, effectively eliminating
risks arising from regional downturn or
loss of key customers,” says Richard
Grohol, EVP World-wide Field Opera-
tions, Roamware. Today the company
enjoys a leadership position with its
comprehensive bouquet of roaming so-
lutions and other line of key business
like carrier service, social network com-
merce and mobile financial services.
Roamware’s group relationships in mo-
bile operator world include Orange,
Vodafone, Telefonica, Airtel, Claro,
Orascom, Telia Sonera, Telenor, MTS,
Vimplecom, STC, T Mobile and Eti-
salat among several others.
“Our business model is a blend of
software license, transactional rev-
enue, revenue share and managed
services resulting in a
robust and predictab
le revenue model and
recurring revenue
constituting 30
percent of company’s
revenues.”
Richard Grohol
EVP World-wide Field Operations
“ Within the roaming segment,
Roamware’s product innovation has
been instrumental in driving quiet a
few industry standards. Key indus-
try standards including Open Con-
nectivity, Steering of roaming and
global roaming
quality are
standards that
were introduced
as a result of
industry adoption
of innovative
Roamware
products.”
Dr. John Jiang
CTO and EVP Product Management
Comprehensive Suite of Roaming So-
lutions
It’s been nearly decade since Roamware
was set up, and the company developed
its solutions completely out of India
using local talents. Srinivasan’s vision
was to create a world class product suite
that could meet global standards. The
company had the good fortune to work
in a market where they were surrounded
by the Indian GSM operators who were
very focused on value added solutions
and services. “The company always
wanted to build products in sync with
customer’s business requirements and
we had the privilege of engaging most
of the operators in India and Asia Pacific
at that time, clearly a market where the
adoption of value added services and
new services was far more advanced
and aggressive than the U.S Market at
that point in time. Within the roaming
segment, Roamware’s product innova-
tion has been instrumental in driving
quiet a few industry standards. Key in-
dustry standards including Open Con-
nectivity, Steering of roaming and global
roaming quality are standards that were
introduced as a result of industry adop-
tion of innovative Roamware products,”
says Dr. John Jiang CTO & EVP Prod-
uct Management, Roamware
Dr Jiang, further adds the invention
of a “Method and System for Cellular
Network Traffic Redirection” was
widely embraced by the GSM Associa-
tion’s mobile industry standards known
as “Steering of Roaming”, empowering
a mobile roamer’s home network oper-
ator’s system to direct any of its sub-
scribers to roam on its preferred roaming
partner’s network when using their mo-
bile phones abroad. The network-based
approach that Roamware first created in
its Roamware Traffic Redirection sys-
tems permits the mobile network opera-
tors to apportion outbound roaming
traffic to its roaming partners in line
with their business commitments, cus-
tomer’s service requirements and global
alliance and is agnostic to locations,
time zones and mobile handset make.
Today, Roamware’s voice and data
roaming solutions are installed in over
464 mobile operators’ networks across
154 countries and generate incremental
revenues for mobile operators, whilst in-
creasing their operational efficiencies
and reduce subscriber churn. The solu-
tions are built on the Roamware Service
Delivery System (SDS), a carrier-grade
platform based on open standards that
enable seamless integration of multiple
applications which can be seamlessly
added as blades to the core platform,
each blade representing a product. “The
robust carrier grade Roamware SDS (
Service Delivery System ) is the under-
lying platform and bedrock of all
Roamware products and solutions and
enables for our customers a range of ca-
“The platform is designed for ease
of integration into existing infra-
structures. Because of the use of
open standards such as
SOAP, XML, J2EE
and its pluggable
component design,
it can easily integrate
with existing legacy
systems and
third party
software.”
Avnish Chauhan
EVP Engineering
pabilities that reduces time to market for
new services, and constitutes a signifi-
cant barrier to entry for competition.
Roamware’s thought leadership coupled
with our global execution capabilities
have been the keys to our success This
outstanding effort has resulted in over
196 patent submissions , introduction of
several ground breaking products in the
past few years and 28 patents awarded
till date,” says Avnish Chauhan, Execu-
tive Vice President Engineering
Product Suite
Roamware’s product portfolio consists
of over 40 solutions across the GSM and
CDMA domains that are built on the
Roamware Service Delivery System
(SDS). The Roamware SDS facilitates
seamless deployment and integration of
network applications and services with
a mobile operator’s core network l and
IT infrastructure. The Roamware SDS is
the backbone of Roamware’s solutions
and supports the smooth deployment of
value-added applications and services. It
embodies a modular, component-based
layered platform architecture that en-
ables applications to achieve optimum
performance, while supporting seamless
integration with an operator’s network
management and operation support sys-
tems, through open and standards-based
protocols and interfaces. It allows the
operator to unify critical subscriber and
network information for the design and
deployment of intelligent personalized
services on 2G, 2.5G and 3G networks,
on an easy-to-use application deploy-
ment framework. The platform enables
applications to deliver high availability
through redundant deployment of soft-
ware and hardware elements.
Applications are equipped with in-
tuitive web-based interfaces for ad-
ministrative operations, application
information provisioning and genera-
tion of business and technical reports.
The Roamware SDS includes active
network interface support over proto-
cols such as ISUP, CAMEL and IN
variants, as well as passive monitoring
siliconindia
|19|
August 2010
capabilities for sniffing relevant infor-
mation exchanged over the signalling
network. These interfaces are avail-
able for SS7 and SIGTRAN and facil-
itate seamless compatibility of
Roamware’s applications with evolu-
tions in network technologies.
Roamware’s suite of services, built
on the SDS, addresses a range of busi-
ness challenges including the quick roll
out of roaming infrastructure, traffic
management acquisition and retention of
roamers, driving roaming usage , accel-
eration of prepaid roaming, seamless
service experience, quality of service,
market intelligence, cost optimization
among several others. In addition, the
global availability of converged voice,
messaging and data services fosters sub-
scriber loyalty and increases competitive
differentiation. Roamware’s suite of
roaming services are Traffic manage-
ment, communication and service expe-
rience, virtual home environment,
roaming and local multi-number, roam-
ing and network infrastructure and busi-
ness intelligence and quality assurance.
In line with the strategic role that its
sees for itself for is mobile operator cus-
tomers, the company has now rolled out
a range of carrier solutions to enable a
number of roaming carrier services in
partnership with global voice and data
carrier partners. This would enable
Roamware to optimize roaming calls
cost and would carry the roaming and
interconnect voice traffic for its cus-
tomers. Dr Jiang says, “We are com-
mitted to the success of our customers
and operator’s readiness to allow us to
carry voice traffic is a reflection of the
confidence in our technology, strategic
thought leadership and overall business
value we bring to the table.”
Leveraging global footprint for Mo-
bile Financial Services
The company after building out a global
footprint in roaming space with an esti-
mated 65 percent market share has cata-
pulted itself to the next level with
Mobile Financial Services. The move
siliconindia
|20|
August 2010
into mobile banking and m-commerce
was a logical extension for Roamware
as it leverages its existing global cus-
tomer relationships, business partner-
ships and technology platform.
According to Juniper Research, the
Service Provider market revenues will
exceed $5 billion globally by 2013.
These revenues are based on the com-
missions and charges acquired from the
gross value of money transactions de-
rived from mobile money transfer serv-
ices and remittances. Juniper Research
highlights a significant opportunity for
the providers and vendors of mobile
money transfer (MMT) services as the
market takes off, beginning as early as
2010. Moreover 3–15 percent of inter-
national money transfers currently han-
dled by formal or informal agent
networks will be carried out using a mo-
bile handset by 2015; generating $1.2–
6.2 billion in service revenue.
Roamware is eyeing to grab this market
through strategic partnerships and ac-
quisitions.
In line with their plans for the Mo-
bile Financial Services business,
Roamware acquired Macalla, a leading
developer of mobile financial services
(MFS) solutions and strive to become a
market leader in MFS, specifically ad-
dressing the needs of low income, un-
banked communities across the world.
“Macalla’s m-commerce and mobile
banking solutions are successfully de-
ployed by banks and operators around
the world; these solutions include
credit transfer, international remit-
tance, person to person transactions,
top-up and bill payment. With
Macalla’s acquisition, Roamware aims
to build upon its roaming expertise and
its global operator relationships,” says
Richard Grohol EVP, Worldwide Field
Operations, Roamware.
Roamware’s Macalla Platform en-
ables a wide range of innovative mobile
financial services including direct top-
up, agent top-up, bill payment, person-
to-person payments, mobile banking,
cross border VAS and both national and
international remittances. “The platform
is designed for ease of integration into
existing infrastructures. Because of the
use of open standards such as SOAP,
XML, J2EE and its pluggable compo-
nent design, it can easily integrate with
existing legacy systems and third party
software,” says Avnish Chauhan, EVP
Engineering, Roamware. Adaptors and
plug-ins are used for major transport
mechanisms such as JMS, IIOP, MQ
Series, Tibco, EJB and standard support
for CM, CRM, billing and location
based services.
For instance, Bank of Ireland iden-
tified the need to deploy a prepaid mo-
bile top-up service which takes
advantage of the increased consumer
use of SMS as well as using its existing
ATM channel. Using Roamware’s tech-
nology which enables mobile transac-
tions, Bank of Ireland launched a
prepaid mobile phone top up service.
The service, called Text Top Up, went
live in 2005 and is available to all Bank
of Ireland customers in Ireland on Voda-
fone and O2 networks.
The Roamware Macalla Platform
enables Bank of Ireland customers to
top-up their own prepaid accounts and
others, including friends and family,
directly from their mobile phones. To
do this, customers simply send a free
text message. The transaction is auto-
matically paid for via their Bank of
Ireland account.
Registration is extremely easy and
instantaneous via any Bank of Ireland
ATM. Once registered, a customer can
top-up from his mobile phone anytime
and anywhere in Ireland or overseas.
The top-up call credit is applied auto-
matically within a matter of seconds.
The Roamware Macalla Platform
enables top-ups and associated
processes in a fully secure and reliable
manner. It also provides connectivity
with the mobile operators’ SMS de-
livery and prepaid billing systems as
well as the bank’s payments systems.
The platform includes a suite of web-
based applications for call centre and
rectly with Bank of Ireland to deliver permanent tsb, O2, Bank of Ireland,
the application together with a complete MoneyText, Illuminat and Vodafone.
range of consultancy, technical integra-
“The core leadership team has
tion and on-going support services. Aiming high
worked together for over nine
From launch the system proved to “In a market that is largely known for
years with several
be a very popular service with Bank of its IT services capability “I am proud
decades of
Ireland customers and exhibited an in- to be on deck of on organization that
cumulative
crease in frequency of top-up as well as has built a world class product suite
experience in
a higher transaction value. The service completely out of India and has been
telecom, banking
has also proven popular with bank cus- instrumental in shaping the global
and enterprise
tomers who travel abroad as they can roaming business in over 150 coun-
software.”
Bishal Bisht now top-up their phones as easily as at tries,” says Srinivasan.Soon Srini-
home. Today the platform is used by vasan will be comparing the
SVP Finance and HR
supervisor staff to ensure the smooth mobile operators, banks and independ- performance of Roamware with the 11
and efficient ongoing operation of the ent service providers internationally in- great companies that Jim Collins talks
service. Roamware Macalla worked di- cluding VIVA (STC), mPay, Jawwal, about in Good to Great. si
The Man Behind the Scene
As a co-founder Bobby Srinivasan’s leadership, passion gether for over nine years with several decades of cu-
and keen insight has been crucial to Roamware’s suc- mulative experience in telecom, banking and enterprise
cess. Due to his extraordinary vision and deep market software,” says Bishal Bisht, SVP Finance and HR,
acumen, the company grew by over 25 percent in 2009 Roamware. The leadership team has been recognized
despite the worst economic downturn in recent history. for professional excellence in several industry forums in-
Srinivasan’s career has included senior level service with cluding Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the year, Ste-
SoftPlus (acquired by U.S. Interactive in February vie Business Awards and World Brand Congress.
2000), Objectivity, Hewlett Packard, Apollo Comput- Today the company is riding high receiving several
ers, the World Bank and Shearson Lehman Brothers industry recognitions including the Frost & Sulli-
and this helped him to play the right card for van Technology Innovation Award, Deloitte Tech-
Roamware. Over the last nine years he has been in- nology Fast 50 and Deloitte Technology Fast 500
strumental in transforming the company from a start in 2006. In 2007, Roamware won the Red Her-
up into a global leader in roaming and value added so- ring 100 Most Promising Private North Ameri-
lutions. In fact this earned him lot of applauds in the in- can Technology Companies in 2007 and Deloitte’s
dustry including Distinguished Honoree medal in 2007 Wireless Fast 50.
Executive of the Year in North America in the 2010 In- There is no looking back for Srinivasan, but
ternational Business Awards and the Ernst & Young he believes that there are billions of people who
Entrepreneur of the Year, 2010 Award Finalist for own mobile phone and he aims to transform
Northern California The International Business Awards each mobile phone a bank account for them,
are the only global, all-encompassing business awards where they get paid their daily wages and other
program honouring great performances in business things. He says, “How do we make that mobile
For him the early days of aligning Roamware were phone, more than just a mobile phone and that is
focused around instilling values and cultural elements what we strive to do.” Roamware is building mi-
within the enterprise. He credits the success of crofinance applications and believes that it can
Roamware to his leadership team, and the smart move change the world of the unbanked and underbanked
of building products in India. His continued focus on and make them economic citizens of the world. “I
achieving the vision has helped Roamware to achieve a am aiming at not just make money for the stake
leadership team comprises of a multicultural, experi- holders but also want tos transform the lives of bil-
enced and professional team with global experience and lions of poor people. That is what success means to
an optimum mix of mobile operator and technology me and I think that is what we are going to do in
background. “The core leadership team has worked to- the next five years,” says Srinivasan.
siliconindia
|21|
August 2010
 vc Talk: By Dharmesh Thakker
The author is VP, Advanced Technology Ventures
Investment Trends
The Evolution of
C
‘Tech’ in Cleantech
leantech 1.0 from 2004-
08 was dominated by
solar and bio-fuel start-
ups, founded by semicon-
ductor and biotech execs
in many cases. Massive global energy
markets ($6 trillion worldwide energy
spend, $300 billion U.S. electricity mar-
kets, $20 billion India solar mission),
rising energy costs, favorable regulatory
landscape, and technology maturity
were driving the first generation of start-
ups. By contrast, there seem to be a
growing number of software and net-
working gurus frequenting cleantech
entrepreneur circles and energy effi-
ciency startups these days. At Advanced
Technology Ventures, where I focus on
cleantech and software startups, we
have had the benefit of witnessing this
trend firsthand, given our involvement
in cleantech since 2004, and believe this
mix is healthy for the overall cleantech
sector.
In 2008, at the peak of the cleantech
investment cycle, about $2.5 billion in
equity was invested in solar energy
alone with over 10 venture backed com-
panies raising over $100 million each.
siliconindia
|22|
August 2010
Holistic monitoring, modeling, and control
software solutions hold great promise in reducing
energy usage and regulate heat density and
enhance
Bio-fuel figures were not far behind at
over $900 million in investments. Part
of the reason behind these staggering
figures is the use of expensive equity
dollars to fill-in for virtually nonexist-
ent project finance and debt. Using sim-
ple math, we’d need to see 15-20
multi-billion dollar IPOs in the next few
years to produce venture-like returns.
Moreover, startups need not only a tech-
nology based advantage but also signif-
icant economies of scale (and a few
more billion dollars) to be cost compet-
itive with First Solar and Chinese PV
players in the solar area for example, or
else they risk going down the path of
‘profitless prosperity’. In short, a few
winners will emerge, but until robust
project finance and debt markets
emerge, it will be largely a tough space
except for those that invested very early
in these areas.
Dharmesh Thakker
Investment Areas
Learning from our portfolio of 11 clean-
tech companies, we have refined our
thesis to focus on two key areas: down-
stream technologies for accelerated re-
newables deployment, and demand side
management.
The billions that have been invested
in core research have prepared several
renewables for prime time commercial-
ization. At the same time, the need for
renewables is rising by the day, driven
by rising costs and carbon footprint of
fossil fuel sources, and state and poten-
tial federal Renewable Portfolio Stan-
dards. Recent events like the Gulf oil
spill only exacerbate the problem. How-
ever, widespread commercialization has
been inhibited largely by the lack of grid
parity (price competitive with coal)
without subsidies, and intermittency of
most renewables that requires grid up-
grades. Solar panels, for instance, have
seen prices decline from $5/W a couple
of years ago to less than $2 now, yet the
balance of system (BOS) costs includ-
ing labor, racking, inverters are still
hovering around $4-5/W and continue
to affect the adoption rate. We find in-
novations such as micro-inverters, DC-
DC optimizers, innovative racking
systems that can lower the BOS costs
for solar energy, as the critical missing
link to help solar energy achieve grid-
parity. Similarly, wind has the potential
to be 20 percent of our energy supply by
2030 and a $100+ billion opportunity
annually. Components, control systems,
and predictive analytics that reduce
downtime and can enhance project re-
turns, help multiply wind energy’s foot-
print. More broadly speaking, grid
storage technologies that smooth out the
effect of intermittent renewables on the
grid are another area of strong interest.
As initial deployment of many of these
technologies in the U.S. and Europe
mitigates commercialization risk, they
can be applied to address the massive
market opportunity in India and China
as well.
Demand Side Management, our
other investment theme, includes both
energy efficiency and peak load man-
agement (like smart grid technologies
and demand response). This is where
we see tremendous activity lately from
Silicon Valley software and networking
veterans. After all, if you’ve built your
career building large scale networking
infrastructure at Cisco, enterprise-class
apps at Oracle, or complex analytics at
Google, it’s natural to use your expert-
ise in building wide-area and local-area
networks for the smart grid and energy
apps for utilities, businesses, and con-
sumers. From an investor standpoint,
the relative capital efficiency, potential
to achieve attractive software-like oper-
ating margins, and potential M&A in-
terest from the IT majors as an alternate
path to an IPO, align well with the ven-
ture model. In this sector, we think the
low hanging fruit is in HVAC and light-
ing controls with a specific focus on
It is still hard to see
consumers watch their
energy usage constantly
and change their
behavior to save; they
continue to spend hours
a day on gaming and
social media sites
instead
commercial and industrial sectors.
Lighting and HVAC consume over 50
percent of the $80+ billion in commer-
cial energy usage in the U.S., and en-
ergy efficiency via intelligent controls
ranks high on the CFO’s list driven by
attractive ROI, bottomline savings, and
compliance drivers. Additionally, CIOs
are increasingly faced with enhancing
the transactions per Watt in addition to
transactions per dollar from their ever-
growing datacenter footprint. Holistic
monitoring, modeling, and control soft-
ware solutions hold great promise in re-
ducing energy usage while regulating
heat density and enhancing server per-
formance as well.
Other related areas we dabble in in-
clude transportation and engine effi-
ciency (a somewhat contrarian thesis to
electric vehicles) and recycling. There
is an attractive amount of cash in trash
as we have discovered – all the way
from recycling the 130 million cell
phone and portable electronics that are
retired in the U.S. every year and creat-
ing a market in developing countries, to
taking landfill gas for energy genera-
tion. How sustainable the underlying
technology is remains to be seen, but
these business models and operating
margins are interesting enough to con-
sider.
New Areas of Opportunity for
Innovation
The wild-card in our mind is the appli-
cation layer for the smart grid. When
core routers and other Internet infra-
structure were being rolled out world-
wide in the ’90s, who could have
guessed that killer apps would revolve
around e-commerce, social media, and
online gaming? We are in the first cycle
of rolling out effectively a two way
communications infrastructure on our
utility grid, aka smart grid. Data mining
applications that leverage granular data
from smart meters, planning and deci-
sion control systems for utilities, adver-
tising platforms for appliance makers
and energy conservation promotional
programs for consumers all present
sizeable opportunities that an applica-
tion ecosystem can address.
A classic example in this arena is the
residential energy efficiency opportu-
nity. Over $225 billion in energy is con-
sumed every year in the U.S. by homes
and small businesses, and over $45 bil-
lion of that can be avoided by simple
conservation measures. Over two dozen
startups, the last time I checked, in the
home area energy management space
believe that consumers will opt for the
‘right thing to do’. However, conserva-
tion has historically been at odds with
convenience and comfort. Whether you
believe that homeowners will buy $300
fancy displays from Best Buy or expect
the local utility to subsidize them, it is
still hard to see consumers watch their
energy usage constantly and change
their behavior to save $20-30/month. I’d
argue the mean-time-to-kitchen-drawer
is probably in weeks, if not days as the
novelty wears off. At the same time,
consumers have continued to spend
hours a day on gaming and social media
sites and are driven by their virtual
image or online avatars. Applications
that can crack the code of aligning en-
ergy efficiency with consumers’ online
image or incentivize them perhaps with
virtual currency can start to move the
needle on residential energy efficiency.
I haven’t seen that yet, but feel strongly
that this class of smart apps at the inter-
section of energy efficiency, business,
and social media, a cleantech 2.5 cycle if
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August 2010
Technology: By Rajiv Kumar
The author is CEO, Rocketalk
Mobile Space
Revolution
at the Cusp of
T
he mobile space is going
through unprecedented
activity and innovation.
This momentum reminds
me of the explosion in the
Internet space in the late 90s. On one
end of the spectrum, advanced devices
and platforms are being rolled out and
on the other end applications are un-
folding at record speeds. Users in ad-
vanced markets such as the U.S, are
experiencing the mobile Internet on
Smartphones and advanced mobile
devices such as the iPad, whereas
users in markets like India and other
emerging markets are getting their
first taste of mobile data on their fea-
ture phones and that too at levels way
beyond the expectations of operators.
Technologies such as LTE and 4G are
getting rolled out at the network in-
frastructure level in markets such as
the U.S.
Device makers such as Apple,
HTC, Motorola, Samsung and LG are
on a path where Smartphones will be-
come the de facto devices in the hands
of users. Today, such devices have al-
ready captured 40 percent of all mo-
bile devices sold in advanced markets
such as the U.S. Users are finally be-
ginning to get comfortable with touch
screen devices. As prices drop with
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August 2010
higher volumes and better technology,
this number is expected to go up to
over 75 percent of all devices sold
being Smartphones. These mobile de-
vices are typically powered by mobile
operating systems like Android,
iPhone, Maeemo, Symbian^3, RIM
and now Bada. Of these, Android
seems to be getting the highest quarter
over quarter growth with a number of
OEMs shipping phones or in ad-
vanced stages of design.
In markets such as India and
China, affordable, yet feature-rich
mobile devices have made a big dent
in the market share of established
players. These devices are typically
based on the Mediatek chipset and
have features like WAP browser,
Bluetooth stereo, Qwerty keypads,
Dual-SIM, 2 Mega pixel or higher
cameras, video cameras, and even Wi-
Fi, and are able to accept download-
able applications. We now see
consumers trading up from their
voice-only phones to these affordable
feature-rich phones.
These are the same consumers
that end up experiencing the Internet
for the first time on the mobile
phones and in turn, downloading ap-
plications that are primarily oriented
towards entertainment or social net-
working. We see a very high number
of users, from smaller towns and cities
(B and C cities) that are discovering
the rich world of applications and the
mobile Internet on their feature
phones. Users want the anytime, any-
where access in their hands, and once
they taste this freedom, they are not
willing to give it up. As opposed to the
typical metro audience that wants the
Facebook and Twitter experience,
these users are looking for interaction
and “near-live” entertainment with ei-
ther their friends or like-minded peo-
ple. Their hunger for information
and entertainment seems apparent as
you look at their usage patterns.
Using mobile applications such as
RockeTalk, the creation and con-
sumption of UGC content is very high
since the mobile phone, for the first
time, allows these users to express
themselves using a medium that is ac-
cessible and familiar.
With the explosion of Smartphones
and even feature-rich phones that allow
downloadable applications, app stores
are opening up at the operator level,
ecosystem level like those of Apple and
Android, the device OEM level and in-
dependent app store players like Getjar.
Of course, developers will have a harder
time trying to get their applications pro-
visioned with a wide variety of App
Store SDKs but will also enjoy the re-
sulting distribution. Discovery of appli-
cations will remain a challenge. Take
the example of the iPhone App Store,
where over 200,000 applications exist.
On the Android App Store there are
over 50,000 applications. A new appli-
cation, however interesting and engag-
ing, will have a difficult time attracting
attention from the user base in this
crowded space. The winner is obvi-
ously the consumer that will increas-
ingly have much more choice when
looking for applications. As a proof
Location based and augmented reality based
applications will begin making their way into
the hands of consumers.
point, there have been over 4.5B ap-
plications downloaded from the
Apple App Store alone.
The debate of Apps vs browser
based applications has intensified as
well. While native Apps exploit the
underlying device capabilities,
browser based apps thus far have not
been able to optimize access to the de-
vice capabilities such as the camera
and the address book. However, as
the HTML5 standards evolve, these
issues will get solved and browser
based apps that rival native apps may
actually become a reality. This will
create a much easier ecosystem for
app developers since this will mitigate
the need for massive porting efforts
currently needed to cater to the huge
number of mobile devices.
In India, the launch of 3G net-
works will open up opportunities for
rich content, collaboration and com-
munication services. Applications that
use rich video, audio and music will
make use of this increased bandwidth
The cost of R&D centers in
India has continued to
decline over the last two
years, according to a Zinnov
study. It says that R&D cen-
ters in India have helped
parent organizations save
$40 billion for the last three
years and the cost has
declined by 0.9 percent in
Rupee terms, four percent
in U.S. Dollar terms in FY
2010. The cost of R&D
centers in India is $38,199
per person per year.
and data speeds, and in turn provide a
great user experience. Location based
and augmented reality based applica-
tions will begin making their way into
the hands of consumers. Social gam-
ing applications that require low la-
tencies will also begin making their
presence felt. As the base platforms
evolve, we won’t be too surprised if
game players like Zynga make their
web based multi-player games avail-
able on mobile phones as well.
Enterprise applications on the mo-
bile are just at the beginning of the
curve. As devices improve, the net-
works get better, the mobile worker
will get connected to the back-end en-
terprise systems with a much more
user friendly interface. Applications
such as Wireless Health will see lots
of innovation as the base platforms
evolve.
At the device level, technologies
like NFC (Near Field Communica-
tions) will enable secure payments
and other secure transactions like
entry and exit. Wi-Fi will make its
way into the mid to high end devices
since it allows the network data traffic
to be offloaded to lower cost landline
networks.
GPS on the mobile phone will in-
creasingly be part of the feature set
and this will allow the location-aware
apps to offer more compelling infor-
mation and services.
Longer battery life will be next
frontier as devices continue to scale
up in terms of functionality and min-
utes of use.
In summary, the mobile space is at
the cusp of a revolution – be it in the
area of the network, access speeds, the
device itself and the application
ecosystem. For the first time, the win-
ner will be the consumer at levels
higher than the operators! si
siliconindia
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August 2010
Technology: By Prathapan Sethu
The author is CEO and Co-Founder, QBurst
S
Doing IT Services Business with
SMBs and Startups
MBs and startups are the
engines of growth in ad-
vanced economies. The
Fortune 500 companies
will continue to dominate
IT spends, but because IT has become
much more affordable, its adoption is
now happening at a faster rate among
SMBs. If you are a small to medium
IT services provider yourself, you
will find it difficult to break into the
Fortune 500 club as they are domi-
nated by bigger and established ven-
dors. So focusing on the SMB market
makes sense and this sector has its
own advantages. The sales cycle to
close a deal with a Fortune 500 com-
pany is typically long. In comparison,
SMBs and startups make quick deci-
sions as there is less bureaucracy.
However, successfully doing a proj-
ect with SMBs and startups and mak-
ing a profit on it is a challenge. SMBs
count their beans and seek value. So
how do you engage with them prof-
itably? Below are some tips on how
you can successfully conduct IT serv-
ices business with SMBs.
Do Smaller Projects
Every one likes to win big projects
and close big deals. With SMBs,
however, you should look for smaller
and longer engagements than bigger
and shorter engagements. Do not try
siliconindia
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August 2010
to do a large fixed-cost project with
them. An SMB may want to IT-enable
their entire operations at one go. Typ-
ically business owners want to get
everything done within 6-9 months
and then go into maintenance mode.
In practice, this won’t work. It is pru-
dent to break the big project into
smaller ones. Finish each project, de-
ploy it, get the business use it, get the
payment, and then go for the next
one.
Develop the Solution Iteratively
Adopt agile development methodolo-
gies (see http://agilemanifesto.org/)
for delivering projects. Develop soft-
ware iteratively with each iteration or
sprint lasting for 2 to 3 weeks. Dur-
ing the initial days of a sprint, provide
mocks to the client so they know
what to expect. While executing the
project, keep in touch with the client
on a daily basis. Do not sign-off a re-
quirements document, go away and
develop software in an isolated envi-
ronment without client involvement.
Deliver working software at the
end of each iteration. Let the end-
users use the application and provide
feedback. Never force your solution
on the client. You may be the IT ex-
pert, but they are the domain experts.
Listen to them and take their view-
points seriously.
Manage Changes
Change management methodologies
used in large enterprises will not work
in the SMB - startup world. Even if
you have worked out a detailed con-
tract and have scoped the project to
the minutest detail, changes are in-
evitable. In the small world, you have
to be comfortable with rapid changes.
You wouldn’t want to nickel-and-
dime every small change request, but
small changes quickly add up landing
you in red.
So how do you handle changes?
One of the principles in the agile man-
ifesto is ‘collaboration over contract’.
This principle is very important in the
context of small businesses. If the user
requests a minor change do not show
them the contract or the signed-off re-
quirements document and make them
go through complicated change re-
quest processes.
However, you need to protect your
interests too, so it’s about convinc-
ing the customer of the time and
cost implications of a change. It’s
also a good practice to record
changes, even if you decide not to
charge the customer. The important
thing is to be flexible, do not raise a
hue-and-cry over every change re-
quest. At the same time, make the
customer realize that changes cost
time-and-money.
The best practice is to plan short
sprints and agree beforehand with the
customer not to make major changes
during the sprint. Change requests can
be taken up and implemented in subse-
quent sprints.
Hire a Different Kind of Developer
If most of your customers are from the
SMB segment, you should consider
carefully the kind of developer you
want to hire. Developers hailing from
bigger organizations serving Fortune
500 customers may not work well with
smaller customers. Those developers
are more comfortable working in a silo
environment where a business analyst
documents the requirements, an archi-
tect designs the solution, and a QA team
validates results.
In an SMB environment, develop-
ers should do more than coding. They
will need to directly interact with the
customer. They should be business ana-
lysts, solution architects, and usability
experts all rolled into one. They should-
n’t just write code and expect QA to find
the bugs for them. In short, you should
be hiring the kind of people who can in-
teract directly with your customers and
can take full ownership of the problem.
They shouldn’t be mere technical ex-
perts.
Reduce Total Cost of Ownership
Very often solutions providers make the
mistake of trying to reduce the immedi-
ate cost of their solution, but not the
long term total cost of ownership. This
may work in the short term, but if you
want to earn the trust of your client and
do continuous business with them, you
should be willing to make short term
sacrifices. Most clients are themselves
happy to make short-term sacrifices in
return for long term savings.
For instance, you may be able to re-
duce the immediate development costs
if you purchase a commercial, instead
of free open source, database. However,
if you add up the license costs and the
future costs of upgrading licenses and
You have to be comfort-
able with rapid changes.
You wouldn’t want to
nickel-and-dime every
small change request,
but small changes
quickly add up landing
you in red
buying more licenses as the system
grows, the long term cost of ownership
could be higher for a commercial data-
base. You have to educate your client on
the pros and cons of commercial versus
free open source and help them take a
decision. Not that free and open source
is always better and cheaper. On the
contrary, there are many situations
where commercial software provides
lower cost of ownership over the long
term.
Embrace the Cloud
For SMBs and startups it might make
sense to avoid investing in capital items
like servers and firewalls. Running their
own datacenter, however small, is an
expensive proposition as they could end
up hiring a full-time person for running
it reliably. An attractive alternative is to
sign-up with a cloud computing service
provider like Amazon, which offers a
pay-as-you-go model. The advantages
include zero upfront capital investment
and the ability to scale as the business
grows. Most cloud computing providers
have datacenters in multiple geographic
zones; you can setup backup servers in
other zones to ensure high-availability
of mission critical systems. There are
also data backup services available on
the cloud, where you can reliably
backup data.
Provide Mobile Access
Most small and medium business own-
ers and employees do not spend their
working hours in front of a computer.
Many of them are on the field, traveling
between locations or meeting clients.
This means that providing a solution
that can be accessed only through a
desktop browser is not the most effec-
tive. Since most business owners carry
a smartphone, it is now possible to pro-
vide them with realtime data, alerts, and
reports so that they can quickly take de-
cisions, even while on the move. This
means that your solution architecture
must be based on Application Program-
ming Interfaces (APIs), which can be
accessed in a secure manner from
browsers, smartphones and tablets alike.
Choose Open Systems
One of the decisions to make while
building an integrated system is to
buy or build subsystems. There are
plenty of Software as a Service
(SaaS) choices in the market today.
For example, there are SaaS applica-
tions that provide project manage-
ment, document management,
timesheets, expense tracking, ac-
counting, and payroll services.
Leveraging them can often speed up
the system development process. So
how do you choose the right subsys-
tem? The most important considera-
tion is that these SaaS applications
must provide programmatic access
through APIs. Your job is to make
the different applications talk to each
other and create an integrated system
experience for your client. Also,
there should be a way to export ap-
plication data in a portable format,
so that in case you decide later to
discontinue the use of a particular
SaaS application, you will still have
all the data. You should not get your
client locked into a particular SaaS
vendor.
Conclusion
SMBs and startups are demanding
clients, but that is where the growth is.
The practices described in this article
provide you with a roadmap on how to
successfully and profitably engage
with this fast growing sector. si
siliconindia
|29|
August 2010
Technology: By David D’Souza
The author is CEO, Moprise
Mobile
A
Productivity
in the Enterprise
doption of the personal computer by
businesses has been credited with 30
to 60 percent growth in U.S. per-
sonal productivity in the 1990s.
Microsoft’s Excel, Word, and Pow-
erPoint have changed the way people work across
the globe. Businesses quickly saw the value of these
tools and integrated them into everyone’s desktop.
The knowledge worker came to the forefront; intel-
lectual property, not manufactured goods became
the unit of output. Keeping the machine working re-
quired huge investments in IT – people, hardware,
software, and later, services and connectivity. These
investments and the resulting output fueled the
growth of the U.S. economy.
Today, the PC is being augmented by more mo-
bile form factors such as advanced application
phones and slates. However, the capabilities of mo-
bile devices are rapidly advancing and daily com-
puting tasks will move off the PC and onto the
mobile. Mobile usage in the enterprise will be broad
based and no longer aligned with vertical roles like
field service or salesmen.
Docking stations will
provide the big
screen and
keyboards
required
f o r
doc-
ument
creation
but mobile de-
vices in their
pure form will allow
us to remain engaged
siliconindia
|30| August 2010
App phone developers
more easily create
Software Challenges that Enable Mobile Productivity
complex applications
Criteria Drivers
using sophisticated
Cross Platform Employees will need to standardize on a modern app phone
tools, user interfaces,
that has great support with consumer and enterprise focused
developers. Expect employees to pick the phone and the basic
libraries, and APIs that
fees but the corporation pays for excess data and voice usage.
are often more
functional than their
Enterprise Data Sources Corporate intelligence is federated across multiple services,
data stores, and file formats. Popular document types and cloud
services will have mobile experiences due to robust developer
support around the major application phones. Moving forward,
PC equivalents
throughout the day with 80 percent of the work. Our
it will be important to prioritize mobile availability across any
new services and document types you adopt for your company.
corporate IT practices will evolve to capture the mo-
bile opportunity for their broad workforce. Issues
Mobile Optimized Experience The enterprise apps need to cater to the mobile usage scenario
– small screen, intermittent access, and contextual awareness.
such as device selection, application selection, and
Better integration with on-device calendar, contacts, and other
management are different versus the PC. How will
applications will be a positive step towards getting the most
ways we worked with PCs need to be re-
use from the app. The apps should be easy for end users to
people use these devices to improve productivity in
visited with a mobile context in mind.
configure and updates should come from the application store.
the work place? What applications will people use
The desktop PC was inherently im-
The move from device management to app management is
to move their businesses forward? What resources
App Centric Manageability
mobile and it made practical sense to
important. An IT mobile management system that focuses on
will corporations deploy to gain the benefits of mo-
the enterprise applications and leaves the consumer applica-
have one at work and one at home. Pro-
bile computing? These are all questions a business
tions alone will be important.
curement, security, and management work usage of the device. The cost sav- team discussions and schedule, collabo-
must answer if it wants to remain competitive.
processes evolved around the ‘work’ and ings for the corporation will be substan- rating with coworkers, and accessing the
Before we can understand these questions, we
‘home’ instance of computing power. In tial as base line device and subscription team’s intelligence are key tasks people
need to define some basics. Mobile phones, in this
the mobile world, multiple devices are no fees will be individually paid, basic sup- perform when moving the business for-
context, don’t refer to a common wireless voice
longer required nor are they practical, port will come from consumer support ward. Access to multiple businesses’ IT
phone but rather the new generation of application
save for the most vertical of scenarios channels, and employee availability on systems needs to come together on the
phones. App phones are differentiated from ordi-
such as dedicated field service equip- the single phone will be greater. This isn’t mobile device to deliver this experience.
nary mobile phones and smartphones because they
ment. Data shows that people favor their a new phenomenon as many corpora- Today, these systems are likely optimized
are first and foremost mobile computers. Older gen-
personal device outside working hours, tions have already reduced their IT budg- for desktop access whereas mobile de-
eration smartphones provided wireless voice com-
defeating the corporate goal to enable ets by providing yearly IT stipends to vices need a filtered view of the data that
munication and fixed function mobile services like
24/7 connectedness. With one phone, employees to purchase and maintain prioritizes and contextualizes what is
basic email and games. Apps were written and de-
users will value the privacy of ‘their their own laptops instead of issuing cor- most relevant to the user across all these
veloped by programmers at the ‘factory’ and em-
stuff’ while corporations value control porate laptops. data sources. While there will likely be
bedded into the phone. A class of downloadable
over their IP on the phone. Operating However, the most interesting space individual applications for each data
applications could be written but often used esoteric
systems, applications, and administrators is the software and services that will be source that is full featured and allows
APIs offered a cumbersome user interface and had
will have to enforce and respect these run on the application to drive the busi- deep access, the aggregated, unified view
significant performance or functional limitations.
boundaries. ness forward. In the consumer space, app will be the most challenging but also the
The modern app phones include CPUs, operating
Device procurement, subscription phones use their computing horsepower most useful starting point to keep in
systems, user interfaces, and screens that are as rich,
services, hardware selection, and owner- to deliver entertainment in bite sized touch with work.
expressive, and detailed as any available on today’s
ship are all inter-related issues. In the PC chunks. The vast majority of the two Mobile in the enterprise will enable
personal computers. Today’s app phone developers
world, the corporation had its own verti- hundred thousand iPhone applications faster, more efficient, and timely en-
more easily create complex applications using so-
cal stack of PC software and services and sixty thousand Google applications gagement on business opportunities.
phisticated tools, user interfaces, libraries, and APIs
built around the corporate PC. An app serve to keep us entertained and con- App phones have advanced sufficiently
that are often more functional than their PC equiv-
phone is very personal, relatively inex- nected with friends and family. Games in price, capability, and software qual-
alents. Whereas inexpensive desktop computation
pensive, and rapidly advancing such that and social networking applications are ity that broad based use in the enterprise
was the ‘must have feature’ for the PC generation of
device selection will be made by the con- easily launched, used, and put away in is now possible. App phones will allow
computing, the app phone generation gains mobil-
sumer instead of the corporation. The as- the thirty to sixty second breaks we get corporations to integrate mobile into
ity, instant availability, and universal connectivity
sociated data subscriptions and support between activities in our daily lives. Sim- their IT offerings in a more cost-effec-
as its ‘killer features’. To deliver these benefits, the
contracts will also remain consumer ilarly, for mobile enterprise applications, tive fashion than ever before and enable
app phone has made a clean break with the PC ar-
driven. Naturally, corporations will auto- a ‘less is more’ experience will resonate a new decade of productivity and effi-
chitecture and value stream – meaning the pricing
matically reimburse employees for the with users. Keeping up-to-date with the ciency gains. si
models, hardware, software, user interaction, and
siliconindia
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August 2010
Technology: By Y K Maheshwari
The author is Practice Head, Mobile , Mphasis
c. Can we have a single code or applica-
tion design, which can run over 99 % of
devices in the market place?
d. How do we upgrade the current version
make sure that call gets priority. Home Based on nature of mobile user’s
button in i-Phone or exit in other de- movement, the network can disconnect
vices can also make ‘force quit’ type of anytime. The application has to consider
operations. Special care needs to be this and should be designed to have grace-

L
automatically? taken within applications to release re- ful exit anytime. Connection state should

Mobile Applications
Best Practices in Designing e. How do we handle roaming customers
being able to access enterprise systems?
f. What will happen to personal informa-
tion on device, if the device is lost?
Challenges faced by Development
ast few years have seen a new developer community Teams:
bursting on the horizon with development of applica- While building the applications, the users
tions happening over multiple types of mobile plat- have the choice of devices and various op-
forms. Most popular ones are Apple, Android, erating systems which a device may come
Blackberry and Symbian. WebOS, badaOS (Samsungs preinstalled with – such as Symbian S-60,
own OS ), Qualcomm’s Brew MP, Nokia’s Maemo and Qt Mobile. S40, UIQ, RIM V 4.5, i-phone OS3.2,An-
After iPhone was launched, it has changed the overall paradigm for droid 2.1 etc.
developers. iPhone Provided a very sleek and consistent user interface, Each type of device can differ with
with ease of use. screen size, resolution, amount of mem-
ory available, processor speed, add-on,
Types of Mobile Applications: jvm installed, browser type and additional
Starting with PIM (Personal Information Managers), Active Sync type of ap- sensors like GPS, accelerometer, proxim-
plications, the mobile development has matured to provide push emails, social ity, Bluetooth etc.
media networking apps out of the box. New applications are more complex There are different protocols with
than the applications which are developed for PCs. These applications have service providers such as GSM, GPRS,
controls and sensors such as accelerometer( direction and acceleration –pe- CDMA, WCDMA, 3G-EDGE, HSDPA
dometer, touch, voice, GPS (Geo location) Compass( to know user naviga- etc.
tion system), proximity sensing, RFID (NFC phones) and cameras. No one
gets to see these applications using complex algorithms in really quick ex- Security
ecution times. The first consideration for any designer
Some of the applications are preinstalled, prebuilt into the device and would be safety of personal data of users,
billed. Specialist teams build these applications and device makers local data storage, security, private infor-
choose to ship them as ‘Value proposition’ right out of the box. (Ex- mation storage in any application.
amples can be PDF reader or a Facebook client)
Devices can range from phones, cameraphones to Netbooks and Battery Life
iPad or HP’ slate. Broadly these applications can be divided into vari- Mobile devices have limited battery to
ous categories perform tasks which can also be a good
a. Native applications ( written specifically using device based soft- consideration for device application in de-
ware tools ) sign, that user gets warning on low battery
b. Subclassified into graphics( games), interactive, transactional, data and some of the processes need not be
centric (stock management),banking (secure) and enterprise( ex- running, if the device battery is not hav-
tension of IT applications ) ing enough power.
c. Browser based ( javascript, html, Xhtml, CSS, wml based web appli-
cations ) Quick to close
d. SMS / USSD based applications ( device independent – messaging pro- Designing application for i-phone can
tocol based applications ) have additional challenges such as only
NewGen applications ( Widgets, portable, auto update and mobile games one application can run over the devices
with extensive creativity ) (uptoOS3.2) as active applications.
Some of the key concerns from enterprise clients are - When there is a call, the designer
a. How do we provision mobile solution within an enterprise? should make sure that he quickly saves
b. Can we have a roll out plan, which also includes audit and usage footprint? the data and closes his operation to
sources when such an event triggers.
Rich Media –No flash content
When we see websites designer building
applications which has rich flash content,
we feel similar content should be available
over the mobile device as well. In reality
flash content, flex and other technologies
are not popular with mobile app develop-
ers. These technologies were designed for
mouse and key click type of controls. With
multi touch kind of actions on touch
screens, the application layers like Flash
does not know which event to trigger.
Hence users have to build the applica-
tions using java scripts and native controls
used for multitouch; swipe and other ges-
ture controls like shake the phone to
change the song.
Web Browsers:
Most of the earlier devices had limited
support for different types of media
being played within their browsers.
Browsers based on webkit standard are
becoming standard for newgeneration
phones.
Good designers to make the site or
native applications work on every de-
vice will need to detect the device type
and plan the design/deployment of dif-
ferent binaries.
Some of these action means the
video file formats supported by device
needs to be known such as 3GP, mp4,
DivX and mov, m4v ( quick time based
). iPad and iPhones support streaming
media type of files like mediacclip.flv,
which is popular on you tube.
Programming Considerations:
Some of the commonly assumed re-
sources in PC based applications such
as memory and network connections
are not available in the mobile devices.
Mobile devices may have 3-4 types
of network connections at their disposal
be saved so that when you reconnect, the
application can resume.
You may even add programs to check
the signal strength, to minimize the impact
and take preventive actions.
Compress the data, if this reduces the
storage needs. Connection managers are
required to be part of the OS as well as on
the target hosts who supply large amount
of data. Resume from last point of down-
load is recommended way to implement
in data sync operations, so that precious
bandwidth is saved.
Development Tools:
Each of the mobile device development
normally requires a different code to be
produced. Users will need to register as
developers, download development
SDK’s, learn device specific functions and
build native applications.
Most of the platforms would need
j2me and C++ knowledge. Open source
based tools such as Eclipse 3.5, Net beans
6.0 can be installed to build these applica-
tions. Some cross platform tools emerging
in the market are Rhomobile, Phonegap,
Appcelerator ( Titanium ). These tools are
still evolving to establish a common
framework.
It helps to have middleware built to
support multiple devices and their specific
function management.
Best Practices in Design:
1. Effective use of memory/ display real
estate
2. Less horizontal scrolling
3. Use of XHTML/CSS/ REST ful web
service architecture ( smaller data feeds )
4. Network error detection
5. No flash/animation
6. Avoid login/ logouts
7. Auto detect devices
8. Use smaller images
9. No pop up windows,
10. No DHTML tags/scripts si

siliconindia
|32| August 2010 siliconindia
|33|
August 2010
Business: By Neeraj Vyas
The author Vice President of Business
Development, Aricent
Back Office Systems
I
Take Center Stage
in Driving Consumer Experience
t is a game where hundreds of
billions of dollars are table
stakes. The question is who
owns customer loyalty and
mindshare and thus is the
driver of consumer adoption? In-
creasingly, in this game, the opera-
tors have been marginalized and are
facing the real danger of being rele-
gated to the sidelines and reduced to
merely a data pipe while the con-
sumer mindshare and loyalty gets
split between the device and the con-
tent providers.
Over the last couple of years, op-
erators have struggled to reinvent
siliconindia
|34|
August 2010
themselves and move up the value
chain to ensure customer loyalty as
well as drive additional revenue. To
this effect, they have realized that
one of the most important pieces of
the ‘consumer experience’ puzzle is
the Operations and Billing Support
Systems (OSS and BSS). It is these
systems that are literally being rein-
vented to offer customers entirely
new kinds of services, from VPN and
IPTV to VoIP, rich multimedia con-
tent, and more. Service providers
need to, and actually are, making
huge investments into upgrading to
cutting edge OSS and BSS systems.
For the consumers; this translates
into pure bliss with respect to new
services being available while, at the
same time, the quality of experience
(QoE) for their existing services is
taken to a whole new level. Especially
with the 3G coming into play in well
as managing consumer experience
through innovative solutions.
In India there are numerous possi-
bilities that can be realized for which
OSS and BSS will be critical. For in-
stance, it could be possible in the near
future for the customer to start and
stop VAS services at will and be accu-
rately billed for them on a pro-rated
basis. This is a far cry from a couple
of years ago when activating a specific
service meant that a consumer had to
either wait for a new billing cycle to
begin or pay for the entire month even
if the service was used only for a few
days. One of the more interesting serv-
ices possible with the newer systems
is seamlessly transferring content
across screens so that if a user is
watching a cricket match and needs to
step out, the feed simply switches to
displaying it on their phone as they
move out of the house and then shows
up on an in-car entertainment system
as the user drives off. Another possi-
bility could be seamlessly transferring
calls from a mobile phone to a land-
line as the user walks into their home
or office, thus negating any network
reception issues.
As OSS and BSS systems become
better integrated, customers can also
expect better troubleshooting of their
problems. Earlier it took a very long
time to pull data across various sys-
tems while the customer waited with-
out service (often on phone listening
to endless ‘on-hold’ music). As these
systems get integrated better, not only
can service providers quickly trouble
shoot reported problems but actively
monitor the systems to anticipate and
fix them before the customer even re-
alizes that a problem exists. Solutions
are evolving to monitor services from
the phone and other handheld de-
vices. QoS focuses on the service
provider’s ability to provide service,
but management of the actual experi-
ence offers a new level of identifying
service problems, from issues related
to coverage at a particular location to
problems with a particular vendor
phone to general or specific applica-
tion or service issues for how a serv-
ice is received by the user. These
advances will greatly assist operators
in immediate identification of QoE
concerns and allow them to rapidly
address the problems without the sub-
scriber needing to complain.
If a user goes out
while watching a
cricket match, the
feed simply switches
to displaying on the
phone as he moves
out of the house and
then shows up on an
in-car entertainment
system as he gets into
the car
OSS and BSS have come a long
way. Today, the user can view their
usage, invoice, balance minutes, pay-
ments, and so on in realtime and
through the channel of their choice (on-
line, IVR Voice, or SMS) providing
them a consistent experience. As the
new next generation networks and tech-
nologies are getting deployed, the OSS
and BSS are playing a big role in en-
abling the next generation services that
allow the customer ultimate control to
choose what service they want to use,
The Asia Pacific personal
computer (PC) market is es-
timated to touch 114.6 mil-
lion unit shipments in 2010,
a growth of 20.3 percent,
says Gartner. The research
house has forecasted that
spending on PCs in the re-
gion is to grow 12.4 percent
in 2010, compared to only
2.9 percent in 2009. Be-
tween 2009 and 2014, the
entire Asia Pacific PC mar-
ket will register a CAGR of
15.7 percent.
how they want to use, and when they
want to use.
Another potential reason for cus-
tomers seeing significant improve-
ments in their mobile experience is
mobile number portability (MNP).
The biggest barrier to subscriber churn
is the pain of having to change their
phone number and lack of MNP cre-
ates a lock-in for customers which
MNP rollout will remove. This will
mean that operators will be forced to
differentiate and create meaningful
services that will create a value-based
lock-in for subscribers and make them
think twice before switching to a dif-
ferent provider. A simple example
could be an operator creating an app
or SMS based service that helps the
customer by-pass IVR and call centers
and instead directly manage toggling
their value added services.
Looking ahead, as operators build
their customer loyalty and upgrade to
cutting edge operations and billing sys-
tems, it is easy to imagine every service
provider becoming the gateway to all
customer content needs as well. Opera-
tor’s OSS and BSS systems will spread
out and integrate with various content
providers (like video, music, maga-
zines, and news services) while doing
away with the need for multiple bills
and payment steps by consolidating
everything into a single bill that they
will deliver to the customer as part of
the mobile service. Operators that are
into triple or quad play services will be
able to leverage their multiple engage-
ments even more and reduce customer
pain by providing a unified seamless
service as well as billing and payments.
Thus, with operators focusing heav-
ily on the end customer experience, the
OSS and BSS systems have taken cen-
ter stage and will see explosive growth,
which is great news for consumers as
this will translate into meaningful serv-
ices, significantly improve the quality
of service, and most importantly enable
accurate and unified billing across
multiple services. si
siliconindia
|35|
August 2010
Management: By Juby Thomas
Business Emerges
B e havio r from
from Beliefs
While Behavior
C
risis is all pervasive, so is
crisis management. The
art of management has
become part and parcel of
our everyday life, be it at
home, in the office or factory, and in the
government. In all organizations, where
a group of human beings assemble for
a common purpose irrespective of
caste, creed, and religion, management
principles come into play through the
management of resources, finance,
planning, priorities, policies, and prac-
tices. Focusing more on leadership
skills, e.g. establishing vision and goals,
communicating them to the employees,
and guiding all to accomplish them is
the need of management. A good leader
must be more facilitative, participative,
and empowering. It is also required of
the management that visions and goals
are established and are carried out. In
the process of crisis management, one
has to look into the behavior of the peo-
siliconindia
|36| August 2010
ple involved. “Any business in the
world is an outcome of people’s behav-
ior. It includes both the behavior of the
organization and its customers. If you
draw examples from the forest ‘tiger
chases the deer’ both are running for
survival and the one who wins the race
will survive and the other has to die,”
says Devdutt Pattanaik, Chief Belief
Officer of Future Group.
Thankfully, the Indian approach to
crisis is different from the western one.
The west always has the tendency to
look outside and when a crisis arises
they will say the problem is ‘out there’.
But the Indian cultural practices have
taught us to look ‘inside’, and so when
a crisis arises we look into the problem.
And that is one of our success mantras.
How many of us build an organization
to break it? Unless you don’t break, it
won’t go to the next level. During var-
ious religious poojas people make
beautiful statues of deities and they are
immersed in a river or lake to complete
the rituals. So too in business, one has
to die to give way for the other.
Life is full of mystery. Consider, for
example, the mystery of how we got to
the point where executives are paid a
king’s ransom to run companies into
the ground and sell off assets. As lead-
ers, you might be doing many things,
from inspiring to coaching to strategiz-
ing; but nothing will be accounted for
if you don’t produce results. And the
best way to produce results is the abil-
ity to motivate yourself and inspire
your team to achieve your goal. “Crisis
management includes solving corporate
issues by trying to bridge the gap be-
tween company values and personal
values. Let me illustrate. We walked
into a department in one of our offices
and found everyone unhappy, hence
unproductive. To solve the problem
here we should go to the Gangotri (the
source). We realized that if everyone in
the department is unhappy, the head of
the department had to be the source,”
says Pattanaik.
It happens because just as Draupadi
(Arjuna’s wife), the great heroine of the
Mahabharata, did not choose her hus-
band, most of us do not choose our
bosses. What is presented during the in-
terview may not be what emerges post
induction. Things may either be a
pleasant surprise or a rude shock.
Whatever be the case, one has to find a
way to work with the boss. Failure to
get along with bosses remains one of
the main reasons for attrition. But while
divorce is an option in the corporate
world, it reeks of poor management
skills, on the part of both, the `husband’
and the `wife’.
The world is talking about innova-
tion, but we don’t have to go anywhere
to look for innovation. It is right here,
and we have to look for it. The word in-
novation raises a problem of great im-
portance in the history of technology.
Strictly speaking, an innovation is
something entirely new, but there is no
such thing as an unprecedented techno-
logical innovation because it is impos-
sible for an inventor to work in a
vacuum and, however ingenious his in-
vention is, it must arise out of his own
previous experience and beliefs. Indian
myths teach us that the goddess of
knowledge (Saraswati) comes only at
times of crisis and that is the time
where ideas and innovations take place.
Therefore, after the crisis, knowledge,
wealth, and emotional security
(Saraswati, Lakshmi, and Durga) will
follow you. Fear is the greatest enemy
of innovation.
The importance of emotional intel-
ligence, an embodiment of motivation,
empathy, and social skills, increases as
one goes up the management chain.
One has to recognize the similarity with
Ramayana. Indian scriptures can teach
you a lot about how to live better, both
professionally and personally. Like Kr-
ishna, who stood for leadership and cri-
sis management and Rama who stood
for values in public life, these are very
interesting aspects we have seen. The
Bhagavad Gita, written thousands of
48 percent of U.S. compa-
nies plan to increase their
adoption of managed serv-
ices from outside providers,
says recent report by Gart-
ner. As spending in the IT
sector is expected to in-
crease by 3.9 percent world-
wide in 2010, as Gartner
projected; and companies
looking to add more cost-ef-
fective IT solutions, the ESP
market seems to grow sig-
nificantly this year.
years ago, enlightens us on all manage-
rial techniques, leading us towards a
harmonious and blissful state of affairs
in place of the conflict, tensions, poor
productivity, absence of motivation,
and so on, common in most of Indian
enterprises today – and probably in en-
terprises in all other countries.
Arjuna got mentally depressed
when he saw his relatives with whom
he had to fight. To motivate him the
Bhagavad Gita is preached in the battle
field of Kurukshetra by Lord Krishna
to Arjuna as a counseling to do his duty
while multitudes of men stood waiting.
It has got all the management tactics to
achieve the mental equilibrium and to
overcome any crisis situation.
When asked about what he has in
store for the group, and what is his role
as the Chief Belief Officer Pattanaik
has this to say, “We hope to create
kathakars (storytellers) who will take
the message throughout the organiza-
tion. How did the Bhakti movement
spread across the country? It spread
through songs and stories sung by one
person to another.”
Therefore, it is important for the
present day leaders to discover the link-
ages with the past, since the time of Ra-
mayana and Mahabharata crisis and the
management processes remain the
same. Time changes and so do the faces,
but the wisdom is there for us to see.
Our mind is like a computer, continu-
ously programmed since our childhood
along with some vasanas from our pre-
vious birth. This programming is both
good and bad for ourselves; a healthier
programming makes us productive and
happy individuals, while a bad program
may turn us unproductive. To program
one’s mind in the best possible way one
can resort to the examples derived from
Indian mythology. Most of the modern
managerial materials and problems of
the current world have a very clear sem-
blance to the popular myths where man-
agerial skills were very well utilized.
Time and space can change but wisdom
will remain. si
siliconindia
|37|
August 2010
Technology: By Mohan Hebbar
The author is Vice President – Embedded Systems and
Storage, Symphony Service Corp.
T
Opportunistic Computing
A New Paradigm
hree billion – that is the es-
timated number of cell
phones in the world by the
end of 2010. That number
excludes other types of ac-
cess technologies and deployed sensors.
The average performance of a cell phone
processor is 100 MIPS and communica-
tion is at 200 kbps. However one calcu-
lates it, three billion cell phones pack
in an enormous amount of comput-
ing power, memory space, and en-
ergy that can be shared in a
collaborative way; in a manner
that is representative of distrib-
uted computing, albeit in a dif-
ferent paradigm. Often referred
to as opportunistic computing,
this concept actually meshes
well with the phenomenon of
social networking that has
taken the Internet world by
storm.
Before we decipher oppor-
tunistic computing, let us start
by looking at emerging technol-
ogy applications. LAN, WAN, and
CAN are acronyms that we use as
part of our language. Add one more,
BAN, for Body Area Network, is a net-
work of inter-communicating sensors
and mobile devices that are wearable or
implanted in the human body in order to
monitor vital parameters and transmit the
information to a ‘home base station’ and
in turn to a hospital. Is it not a set of ap-
plications that can heuristically, or
through a defined method, assess the
lifestyle of a human being? Imagine the
volume and kinds of data that can be col-
lected, thereby leading to various busi-
ness applications including personal care,
siliconindia
|38| August 2010
medical insurance, medical drug re-
search, and so on? One could also in-
clude retail data that helps understand
buying patterns, hence, consumer be-
havior and associated market research.
The world is brimming with cell
phones, static and mobile sensors, and
vehicles with sensing and computing re-
sources. Along with device capabilities,
the access technologies available are Wi-
Fi, Bluetooth, Wi-MAX, cellular, RFID,
and NFC. Stepping back, we can see the
opportunity of ‘unlimited’ pair-wise con-
tacts. Opportunistic computing exploits
the communication between a pair of de-
vices enabling possible sharing of con-
tent, resources, and services. If we take
into account the numbers mentioned ear-
lier on the performance of a cell phone
processor (100 MIPS) and communica-
tion speed (200 kbps), then exploiting the
opportunistic contacts can offer the po-
tential to perform at approximately one
quadrillion processing tasks and a data
exchange in the order of petabytes per
second; undoubtedly, a stupendous
amount of power. While we have the
network infrastructure and computing
power, it is up to application scenar-
ios we draw to exploit the existing
and ever evolving infrastructure.
So, to reiterate, opportunis-
tic computing is essentially a
distributed computing paradigm
of a wired network with chal-
lenges of intermittent connec-
tivity and delay tolerance. In
this paradigm, all pervasive and
available communication oppor-
tunities are exploited to provide
computing services to meet appli-
cation needs by leveraging available
computing resources that are available
in the reachable environment.
Challenges of Opportunistic
Computing
Getting a bit more specific, if two devices
need to perform a collaborative task, they
need to know each other’s resources and
each other’s shareable services. This
specificity at a high-level opens up yet
another challenge of trusted collabora-
tion unlike traditional security solutions
that have a centralized authority to cer-
tify the trustworthiness. The approach
will be different in the sense that it re-
quires ‘on the fly’ authentication with
‘any devices’ that can come in the vicin-
ity of another device making use of re-
sources, though the complexity may be
eased if it is within an enterprise network.
Creating a distributed computing envi-
ronment where devices could be ‘alien’,
can come and go in the vicinity, poses an
unstable network and has been a signifi-
cant area of research.
Primary Challenges of Opportunis-
tic Computing
They are of three types:
 Connectivity: Connectivity would
be intermittent due to lack of prior
knowledge, location, time, and
bandwidth of any contacts. This
situation is an area for exploration
in terms of routing methods at
higher layers, as well as a different
way of design of middleware to
hide the lower layer complexity.
 Delay Tolerance: While delay tol-
erance network is one of key focus
in distributed computing, in op-
portunistic computing, a relook is
necessary in terms of caching
mechanisms and methods of re-
mote service execution as in serv-
ice discovery, execution, and
management.
 Heterogeneity: There is a plethora
of devices with many different
kind of access methods at different
radio frequencies and inter-oper-
ability will pose challenges for ex-
ploiting opportunistic computing
applications.
Research Challenges
The paradigm we are envisioning
leverages opportunistic computing in-
frastructure and exploits the social
networking application era. We see
that the business model is moving to-
wards user centricity from network
centricity. As said earlier, imagine the
amount of computing power, mem-
ory, energy, and storage capacity at
hand and leveraging it for social net-
working applications.
 Middleware: Middleware services
need to manage data, services, re-
sources, and more importantly trust,
security, and privacy. Middleware
will have to manage the concept of
reputation of the device, akin to
human behavior that looks for repu-
tation before collaborating with an-
other human. So, middleware will
have to embed and maintain the
users’ social behavior to increase the
efficiency of security. General serv-
ices as in information acquisition
and dissemination, message han-
dling, and resource management are
an interesting challenge to over-
come in a heterogeneous environ-
ment. Another area of research is to
bring in fault tolerant concept in an
intermittent connectivity situation.
 Information management: Given
that a device can be both a producer
and consumer at a fast pace when in
contact, fundamental issues will be,
what to store, where to store, and
how to acquire relevant information
with minimal delays and retry.
 Context awareness: Context is
very relevant for searching the net-
work, given that devices would be
in transient community and an ele-
ment of temporary trust establish-
ment is required. Researchers do
propose ‘social cache’ with a logi-
cal collective view of device in a
given social group. An effective
way of using social cache is an area
of research that is actively pursued
in the industry.
 Resource Management: Primarily
three resources are being focused on
to manage in opportunistic comput-
ing. 1) Available bandwidth and as-
sociated time window, 2) memory
and buffer space within the device,
and 3) energy management as to
how to minimize the data transfer
and utilize the local available mem-
ory.
 Economic Model: The question is
why one would be good enough to
share one’s available resources with
others, when every resource is crit-
ical in a device. However, in a ra-
tional world of community,
specifically in social networking,
the expectation is that participants
co-operate and this characteristic

becomes important to evolve a vi-
able economic model in the elec-
tronic social network.
Applications: Many critical appli-
cations areas can benefit from op-
portunistic computing that can be a
challenge to the traditional network
or within the existing state-of-the-
art network infrastructure.
 Crisis Management: Unplanned,
disruptive events can be managed
by opportunistic computing lever-
aging the available network infra-
structure and crisis management
applications deployed in all devices
as a mandatory service.
 Intelligent Transport System: Ve-
hicular ad-hoc networks can be ex-
ploited to increase traffic efficiency
and safety through collaborative
communication between devices in
the near vicinity and transported to
back-haul traffic management carri-
ers. Other applications in associa-
tion with location based systems
and entertainment offerings can also
prove viable businesses.
Opportunistic computing is bound to be-
come a reality, given the current growth
in the variety of devices and the rate at
which they are getting deployed, be they
cellular phones, end devices with short
range communications, or M2M devices
in a static or dynamic world of sensor
network or ad-hoc network.
It cannot be denied that we would re-
quire more reliable, secure, and delay-
tolerant computing infrastructure upon
which the opportunistic computing par-
adigm can be implemented. The solution
is not ready yet, but it will be. For op-
portunistic computing primarily exploits
human social behavior to build an elec-
tronic social device network for a more
effective pervasive computing. si
siliconindia
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August 2010
 Management: By Bill Emmet & Atwell Williams
Bill Emmett, Senior Manager of Strategic Marketing, and
Atwell Williams, Solutions Architect, Office of the CTO, BMC Software ganization or group where that service had
previously been found in more than one
part of the organization or group. Thus, the
funding and resourcing of the service is
shared and the providing department ef-
fectively becomes an internal service
provider.”i
For example, consider the case where
an enterprise has multiple ERP systems
(e.g., Oracle or SAP) across the organiza-
tion due to acquisitions or as a result of
business units creating their own IT sys-
tems and support. Most likely, each busi-
ness unit experiences a different level of
service, depending on how much money it
had to spend on its particular implemen-
tation. Further, exchanging data between
the systems for consolidation and report-
ing purposes can be time consuming and
potentially error prone. Finally, the aggre-
gate cost of running these multiple sys-
tems is generally higher than the
combined business value delivered. This
is due to redundancies in hardware, soft-
ware, and administration or operation re-
sources. Consolidating these systems into
a single, shared service enables the com-
pany to leverage economies of scale, while
also providing a consistent level of service
across the enterprise.
derlying technology is secondary to the
business objective.
Modernize Your Delivery Platform
A critical element to delivering shared
services is to deliver them as efficiently as
possible. You can accomplish this goal by
standardizing your delivery platform and
then looking for opportunities to modern-
ize it.
Begin by identifying the various de-
livery environments in place for your tar-
get services and evaluating them against
your strategic platform architecture. If you
don’t have a strategic platform architec-
ture, now would be a good time to define
one.
Your target architecture should enable
you to deliver a consistent quality of serv-
ice while also adjusting to accommodate
differing levels of service across the en-
terprise. Technologies such as virtualiza-
tion and private or public clouds can be
leveraged to achieve this objective.
More and more hardware technology
vendors are providing integrated network,
system, and storage platforms. Cisco, for
example, has delivered its Unified Com-
puting System (UCS), which provides a
‘one cable in, one cable out’experience for
following:
Service Catalog Management: The serv-
ice catalog describes to your customers the
services that are available and the Service
Level Agreements (SLAs) to which those
services conform. Ensure that all shared
services are documented and publicized
through the service catalog.
Self-Service Request Management: One
of the major obstacles to customer accept-
ance of shared services is the perception
that service responsiveness will be com-
promised. An effective service request
management process supported by a self-
service portal will enable consumers of
services to request the service that they
want, when they want it, with minimal in-
teraction with the service desk. Addition-
ally, many of these types of service
requests can be automated, further en-
hancing the end-user experience and im-
proving the perception and acceptance of
shared services.
Configuration Management: To facili-
tate system consolidation, an ongoing un-
derstanding of the relationship between
technology components and the resulting
service is critical. Ongoing configuration
management, supported with a well-main-
tained configuration management data-
services and achieving cost efficiency.
These objectives form the underlying
principle of Business Service Manage-
ment (BSM), a comprehensive and unified
platform that simultaneously optimizes IT
costs, demonstrates transparency, in-
creases business value, controls risk, and
assures quality of service. BSM simplifies,
standardizes, and automates IT processes,
so you can efficiently manage business
services throughout their lifecycle —
across distributed, mainframe, virtual, and
cloud based resources. BSM helps to pro-
vide a clear understanding of the services
offered while also promoting increased
simplification, standardization, and au-
tomation.
Effective shared service delivery re-
quires process standardization. The multi-
ple process models that may have been in
place prior to consolidation will need to be
reconciled into a single, consistent ap-
proach. A framework, such as the IT In-
frastructure Library (ITIL), is a good
starting point for achieving process con-
sistency. While going through your con-
solidation exercise, use this chance to
simplify the resulting processes and then
look for opportunities to automate as
many as those processes as possible. Fi-

T
How Shared Services and Business
Service Management Help You Deliver
Increased Value to Your Customers
oday, practically every CIO
is looking for ways to in-
crease the value of his or her
IT organization, while also
maintaining or reducing IT
spending. One approach that many are
pursuing is the elimination of wasteful re-
dundancies and the adoption of a shared
service-provisioning model.
The goal of most shared service pro-
grams is to provide consistent service
quality and delivery to multiple business
departments across the enterprise at a rea-
sonable cost, as opposed to each depart-
ment providing its own iteration of the
same service. Typical examples of redun-
dant services include helpdesks, email,
and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
systems.
Before going too far, however, it’s im-
portant to understand what is meant by
‘shared services’. The term shared serv-
ices has multiple definitions in the IT in-
dustry, but the definition found on
Wikipedia is in line with the thoughts of
most experts and analysts. According to
Wikipedia, “Shared services refers to the
provision of a service by one part of an or-
Sounds good? If so, where do you
begin?
Know Your Services
To get started in shared services, begin by
getting a clear understanding of the serv-
ices upon which your business customers
rely to run the business. Some of these
services may be provided by IT today and
some may not. When identifying these
services, make sure to think about them
from the perspective of business outcome,
not underlying technology. Otherwise, you
may miss out on opportunities for consol-
idation. For example, consider an enter-
prise with a single instance each of
Exchange, Lotus Notes, and Google Mail.
Although there is only one instance of
each application, they are all providing the
same business services: communication
and collaboration. These become the
shared service to be consolidated. The un-
administrators. Solutions such as this
allow system engineers to build the private
cloud and virtualized environments that
facilitate the efficient delivery of shared
services.
Additionally, the correct application
architecture can greatly contribute to ef-
fective shared services. Ideally applica-
tions should be architected to provide
multi-tenancy. This allows core or sup-
porting functions of a service to run as a
single instance, while multiple application
instances can run with the processes, cus-
tomizations, and data being isolated and
secured from each other.
Ensure Comprehensive Management
In addition to the appropriate technology,
effective delivery of shared services re-
quires ongoing comprehensive manage-
ment of that technology and the associated
processes. Specific management compo-
nents that should be in place include the
base (CMDB), provides the centralized
‘system of record’, necessary to sustain-
ing the shared services.
Event Management: To maintain high
levels of service availability, IT must
proactively manage service events in an
effort to prevent them from negatively af-
fecting service availability. Proactive mon-
itoring enables the IT-operations function
to identify early indicators of performance
or availability issues and initiate corrective
action before the service is adversely af-
fected.
Leverage Business Service Manage-
ment
As previously stated, the goal of shared
services programs is to provide consistent
service quality and delivery to multiple
business departments across the enter-
prise. Implicit in this goal are the objec-
tives of delivering business-critical
nally, leverage technology solutions that
support your standardized processes and
enable the areas of automation you’ve
identified.
Closing Thoughts
Your IT organization needs to remain com-
petitive and deliver business value, espe-
cially with the growth of services being
offered through cloud computing. How
can your IT organization provide services
better — and at a lower cost — than the
competition? One answer is through a
shared services approach. By truly under-
standing business requirements and man-
aging IT based on business priorities, your
IT organization is already a step ahead.
Leveraging a BSM approach establishes a
firm foundation not only for improved
business support and increased cost effi-
ciencies, but also for the adoption of a
shared services delivery model. si

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August 2010 siliconindia
|41|
August 2010
Entrepreneur 101: By Gunjan Sinha
The author is the Chairman of SiliconIndia.com and MetricStream. An internet pioneer, he was
the co-founder and President of WhoWhere? Inc., a Internet directory services company acquired
by Lycos in 1998 as well as eGain, an online customer service company. Sinha can be reached
at gunjan@metricstream.com
Designing a Winning
Organizational
I
Culture
t is critical for entrepreneurs to
build an organizational culture
which can help build enduring
and successful companies. How
do you think about the culture
of your organization, and how do you
shape the culture as you hire your em-
ployees and build the team. I feel, be-
yond the obvious elements of startup
success, the organizational culture de-
termines the winners from the losers.
It filters out organizations that are in-
deed going to get the gold medal of
success as they make their mark in
their respective fields. Here are some
siliconindia
|42|
August 2010
key elements for designing the right
organizational culture.
Quality
Sounds obvious, yet I can overstate the
importance of building a high quality
team. Team quality is not just deter-
mined by the resume of the people in
the organizational, but it is more to do
with how well are the various team-
members selected, such that they have
a strong role to play in their respective
areas of competencies. If you start
with a weak team, you are clearly at a
disadvantage. So, it is important that
from the inception of the startup, one
is very focused about hiring the best
team for the job. Remember, if you
hired the best 100 people for your
company, they will effortlessly attract
others like themselves, and help you
scale to the next thousand.
Open Culture: Embrace Partners
and Suppliers
Winning CEO’s and entrepreneurs
know the role of the partner and sup-
plier ecosystems for their business.
You rely not just on your own em-
ployees, but you embrace the carefully
chosen and select set of partners and
suppliers with whom you try and build
long-term, mutually beneficial rela-
tionships. Right from the beginning,
you have to instill an openness culture,
where you treat your partners and sup-
pliers with equal respect and value as
you do to your own employees. A
good example that I can site is from
my own company Metricstream. We
now have over 1000 Compliance ex-
perts who we regularly work with as
partners and who are contributing sig-
nificantly to the success of Metric-
stream. We were deliberate with this
strategy right from the early days of
the company.
Continuous Innovation culture
Startups succeed because they out in-
novate the established players in the
market. It is critical that one sees in-
novation as a competency, as a process
and as a continued effort. This is not
just limited to your initial idea, or a
piece of technology. Innovation has to
span how you think about the very ar-
chitecture of your organization. For
example, at Metricstream we have in-
novated on how we create sales en-
gagement with global customers, or
we have innovated on brand market-
ing.
Culture of Teamwork, Trust and
Transparency
Winning organizations are built on the
foundations of Teamwork, trust and
transparency. Employees work as
teams; they trust each other and are
transparent with data, information and
know-how. This requires developing a
culture, where people are secure about
their contributions are and are fearless
in trusting their team members, and
being transparent.
Creating a strong Vision and perse-
vering in its pursuit
It is important, that one articulates a
strong vision of the market or the busi-
ness early on. It is equally important,
You rely not just on
your own employees,
but you embrace the
carefully chosen and
select set of partners
and suppliers with
whom you try and
build long-term,
mutually beneficial
relationships.
that one drives a persevering culture,
where patience is rewarded, where
failures are seen as opportunities of
learning, and where there is maniacal
focus on the pursuit of the vision. At
Metricstream, we started early with
the vision of helping the world better
manage risks, compliance and gover-
nance. We have been completely fo-
cused on it for a decade now, despite,
periods when markets were skeptical
of our intent. At siliconIndia, we are
74 percent of online retail-
ers have a mobile strategy.
According to a study by
Shop.org and Forrester re-
search, which covered 109
companies, shows that 80
percent of retailers are pur-
suing social strategies to ex-
periment and learn, while
28 percent noted that it has
helped grow their business.
Web retailers enabled with
mobile strategies are invest-
ing in features having var-
ied level of investment and
are experiencing
modest gains.
trying to help build a “smarter” India,
and a better India. This is a big and
powerful vision, and our team at sili-
conindia is obsessed with this vision,
regardless of how long it takes to get
there.
Focus on your own competency, not
competition
It is important that the organization is
focused on raising its own compe-
tency. How do we become better with
our products, with our go-to-market
strategies, or with your sales capabili-
ties? I rarely worry about the competi-
tion. Competition just represents a
validation of the market need and an
opportunity to learn from their experi-
ences. As an entrepreneur, you want to
strong focus on how to raise your
competency, so the focus is inwards
most of the time. At Apple, they are
more worried about how to build a
great iphone product, less on what
Nokia is up to.
Managers as Coaches
As you develop your organizational
culture, it is important that managers
play a role of the coaches, where, they
stand besides their team members
(NOT in front of them!), and help
them win in their endeavors. Managers
create an environment, which fosters
entrepreneurship and accountability at
the same time. They let their team
members learn by making mistakes,
and taking charge. It is critical, that
there is a high focus in the organiza-
tion to create a supporting manage-
ment culture, not a hierarchical
management culture. Hierarchies are
very hard on innovation, and startups
with high protocols and hierarchies
often fail to reach their true potential.
This value must start at the top.
I personally, try to develop these
organizational cultures in the busi-
nesses that I am involved. I certainly
believe that, as a CEO or as an entre-
preneur, one pays utmost importance
to this aspect of your business. si
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|43|
August 2010
CIO Profile: By Vimali Swamy
‘Technology Will Always be
Subservient to Business”
‘B
usiness solutions over technology’ is the mantra that Piyush Singh, CIO of Great Amer-
ican Insurance Group, learned early in his career and has been following over the past
two decades. “Technology advancements may be exponential in pace but the un-
derlying foundation has always been to address business needs,”he says.
A computer applications postgradu-
ate from Delhi University and an MBA
from Bradley University, he is well
aware of both the sides of the coin, the
priorities of any organization - business
enablement and technology solutions.
In today’s world, both cannot survive
without the other.
Singh is quick to point out that it is
a common sight to see IT departments
existing in silos within organizations
and having very little or limited busi-
ness knowledge. It is important that de-
velopers focus on the business problems
they must solve rather than concentrate
solely on technology.
A simple example of what integra-
tion of technology with business can
achieve is the success of Apple’s iPod.
When iPod was introduced several
years ago, the market was already
flooded with several portable music
players. At the user level, there was no
integration - users had to deal with dis-
parate pieces to listen to the desired
music for downloads, file conversions,
and storage. Apple addressed this prob-
lem by making iPod user-friendly and
launching iTunes, a solution to down-
load selected songs and synch with an
iPod. Suddenly, the users from ages 5 to
95 found it easy to use with no training
whatsoever. Apple’s other products like
iPod Nano, iPhone, and now iPad are an
example of what integration of business
and technology can achieve.
siliconindia
|44|
August 2010
‘Innovation’ is another factor that Singh
believes is critical to the role of a CIO.
The evolving role of CIOs’ positions
them to use a varied skill set to lead
practical innovation within their com-
panies. IT leaders and their teams drive
practical innovation to support the cor-
porate strategy. At a growing number of
organizations, CIOs are helping to lead
that change. “The key to achieving in-
novation in both the IT and business en-
terprise is to include CIOs in the
development of the corporate strategy.
Getting IT executives ‘invited to the
table’ and playing a more visible role in
setting the strategy is a hallmark of the
CIOs’ evolving role,” says Singh.
Technology
advancements may be
exponential in pace but
the underlying
foundation has always
been to address
business needs
Singh and His ‘Big 5’
Today, at Great American, Singh is
striving to achieve the same. Working
with technology and business teams to
jointly innovate and solve the problems
has been his straightforward strategy.
Singh categorizes his approach into 5
thoughts.
CIO’s are instrumental in flipping
the 80/20 rule: The 80/20 rule dictates
that businesses spend 80 percent of
their time and resources on maintain-
ing older systems, and only 20 percent
on innovation. In today’s scenario,
CIOs are in the best position to flip the
rule around by seeking creative ways
to leverage the human capital to focus
more on innovation.
CIO’s risk tolerance, personality, and
tenure are correlated to the pace of
innovation at an enterprise: Singh
stands by the idea that CIOs with a pas-
sion for innovation are instrumental in
creating a dynamic environment. A CIO
who has a tendency to be too comfort-
able with ‘current state’ restricts people
from exploring new ideas. CIO’s role of
being a change agent as well as the abil-
ity for calculated risk-taking plays an
important role in the pace of innovation
within the enterprise.
CIO’s physical proximity to business
executives ensures that IT is part of
business strategy: A CIO is account-
able for connecting business and tech-
nology within an organization. The
only way he or she can bridge the gap
and make technology an integral part
of the business is by working closely
with the business executives. Physi-
cal proximity is important to keeping
this at the top of mind.
Solution vs. automation is influenced
by a business sponsor’s personality:
Change agents drive change in the
workplace and are comfortable with
ambiguity and uncertainty that accom-
pany change. They understand that there
is value in embracing ‘comfort with dis-
comfort’. On the other hand, consensus
builders seek to keep everyone happy
and seek the lowest common denomi-
nator, this maintaining status quo. To
build solutions, one needs to look be-
yond existing models and be willing to
change the approach, rather than simply
automating existing processes.
‘On-time and On-budget’ is not rele-
vant compared to strategic/competi-
tive advantage and adaptive
capability of a business driven tech-
nology solution: Do not believe in driv-
ing business on hollow promises of
‘on-time and on-budget’ as it is almost
impossible to achieve. Instead, believe
in building strategic solutions that help
position the businesses as a leading edge
competitive differentiator in a sustain-
able manner.
One of the challenges that Singh
often encounters is a way to seamlessly
leverage and collaborate the global re-
sources pool, so that resources do not
conflict, and to work towards a com-
mon goal. This is a challenge for CIOs
across other industries as well. But the
biggest challenge for him is ‘What to
do next?’ The industry is growing rap-
idly and technology advancements in
the consumer sector that impact the
corporate environment can be over-
whelming. “While a CIO often gets en-
amored by the ever changing
technology, the bigger problem is to
figure out what to do next,” says Singh.
An active member of several CIO
forums, Singh believes in learning from
each other and often looks to his peers
in other verticals, especially the retail
Piyush Singh
and consumer sector where big things
are happening. For example, he sees
growth in the usage of smartphones by
a large segment of population in near
future. Singh believes that the ubiqui-
tous nature and convenience of smart-
phones in the hands of consumers will
force the personal and consumer lines
of businesses to change their business
model to simplify the interaction/inter-
face with consumers. These phones will
enrich the interaction (quicker report-
ing of claims, picture attachments, and
more) and reduce the time lag between
the event and the reporting. “The same
principles will apply for loss adjusters
and loss prevention folks for quicker re-
porting to companies,” he says.
It is these simple, yet thought pro-
voking, ideas that have been a hallmark
of Singh’s illustrative career. Having
begun his career as a developer with
CitiCorp Overseas Software in India,
he has had a global work experience
with stints at ANZ Banking Group in
CIOs are in the best
position to flip the
present rule around
by seeking creative
ways to leverage the
human capital to
focus more on
innovation
Australia, Greece, UK, Sin-
gapore, and the Middle East,
Price Waterhouse’s Manage-
ment Consulting Services
group in Jamaica where he
worked on government con-
tracts and with a local insur-
ance carrier, and later RLI
Insurance in the U.S. where
he moved up the ranks to be
the VP of IT in 2000 and later
as CIO in 2004. He became
Senior Vice President and
CIO of Great American In-
surance Group in 2005. One
of his most recognized works, however,
has been at RLI, where he was respon-
sible for taking RLI from a back-end
focused organization to one that de-
ployed technology to its fullest poten-
tial, striving for business transformation
rather than automation. Sing‘s simple
but effective IT strategy led the com-
pany to deploy leading edge front-end
application systems.
His decision to foray into in-house
development when he joined RLI and
the importance he attached to business
domain are the two turning points that
have impacted his career progression.
His advice to young entrepreneurs
is to face challenges and innovate ways
to solve problems. This positive out-
look of Singh is perhaps a result of his
love for outdoor and adventurous ac-
tivities. After having tackled many
business challenges, the next big thing
he looks forward to is climbing the
peak of Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. si
siliconindia
|45|
August 2010
 siTech20
U.S INDEX
Index of the top tech public companies in U.S founded
Stock Price
(US$)Closing
52 Week
HIGH
52 Week
LOW
% CHANGE IN PRICE
4 Weeks 52 Weeks
CAPITALIZATION
In $ Millions
and managed by Indians 07.23.2010
RANK COMPANY
1 Cognizant Tech. CTSH 55 54 24 5 84 16570
2 Juniper Networks JNPR 28 32 22 18 6 14730
3 SanDisk Corporation SNDK 41 48 13 -10 145 9530
4 Syntel SYNT 43 50 31 29 16 9530
5 Microchip Tech MCHP 31 30 18 7 12 5710
6 Tibco Software TIBX 14 13 6 11 66 2280
7 Qlogic Corporation QLGC 16 22 12 -10 18 1760
8 Aruba Networks ARUN 18 14 7 20 100 1650
9 Cavium Networks CAVM 30 30 17 12 85 1350
10 Isilon Systems ISLN 18 16 4 26 279 1150
11 iGate IGTE 17 11 2 25 143 973
12 Netezza NZ 16 15 7 7 76 965
13 Infinera Corporation INFN 9 10 6 32 23 901
14 Ixia XXIA 11 11 6 20 46 700
15 NetScout NTCT 16 16 8 24 58 665
16 Sycamore Networks SCMR 20 35 2 16 473 557
17 EXL Service holdings EXLS 19 20 11 3 58 554
18 OSI Systems OSIS 28 33 16 -7 37 512
19 Magma Design LAVA 3 4 1 11 136 182
20 Keynote Systems KEYN 10 12 8 3 21 143

INDIA INDEX
Index of the top tech public companies in India
Stock Price
INR Closing
52 Week
HIGH
52 Week
LOW
% CHANGE IN PRICE
4 Weeks 52 Weeks
CAPITALIZATION
In Rs. Crore
23.07.2010
RANK COMPANY

1 Infosys Technologies 2804 2070 1040 0 43 160836

2 Tata Consultancy Services 849 943 358 11 78 165689
3 Wipro Ltd 417 639 197 6 -8 101189
4 Tech Mahindra 738 860 205 -1 -6 9150
5 HCL Technologies 374 352 87 3 66 25295
6 Mahindra Satyam 91 299 6 0 -13 10705
7 Mphasis 618 732 138 10 50 12942
8 Financial Technologies 1366 1895 382 0 0 6267
9 Patni Comp 509 510 94 0 85 6614
10 GTL Ltd 421 343 187 0 41 4076
11 Rolta India 175 206 32 4 25 2823
12 HCL Infosystems 106 189 63 -10 -5 2311
13 Mindtree 531 641 181 -5 17 2103
14 Moser Baer 67 115 40 0 -23 1123
15 CMC Ltd 1667 1320 257 15 103 2545
16 Polaris Software 182 181 25 0 65 1805
17 NIIT Ltd 66 78 14 -2 12 1095
18 Sasken Communications Technology 204 162 35 3 64 551
19 Sonata Software 50 35 13 -4 61 528
20 Subex Systems 56 96 19 4 -19 328

siliconindia
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