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 siliconindia OCTOBER - 2010
Contents October2010
14
Editorial

Removing
Publisher
Harvi Sachar

A Kinks
Editor-in-Chief
Cover Story
Pradeep Shankar
Are We Repeating Adam’s Mistake?
Managing Editor
Christo Jacob
t times snakes are afraid of a sleuthhound army of ants. This
reminds me of Google and Verizon’s current move on
the

Outsourced
Deputy Editor
Jaya Smitha Menon killing the open Internet policy. Is it because of Google’s in-
security, fearing the killer startups popping on a daily basis or an
in
Manufacturing
Editorial Staff aging Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s anxiety to keep his venture in a
Eureka Bharali safer mode by dominating Internet for the rest of his life?
Vimali Swamy Google’s proposal cannot be justified from any angle. If the deal
between the Internet giant Google and the telecommunications be-
Sr.Visualizer Raghu Koppal hemoth Verizon comes to pass in Federal Communications Com-
By Vimali Swamy
Subscription Manager P Magendran mission (FCC), it could signal the biggest blow yet to the principle Indu Navar
of net neutrality  the notion that all networks should treat all Inter-
net sites equally. The proposal is about altering the access to Inter-
Mailing Address net. But the fact is that they are not altering it  Internet will continue
to be the same.
SiliconIndia Inc Google’s new proposal says websites that pay a fee to the net- 06 [In My Opinion] 26 [Technology] 36 [Technology]
44790 S. Grimmer Blvd work provider would have their sites open faster than those that do Emergingdrivers changingland- SOFTWARE TESTING The DLP Prevention is Better
Suite 202, not. In such a pay-to-play Internet, startups will suffer as they will scape of Software TestingBusiness Old & The New than a Cure
Fremont, CA 94538 not be able to compete with larger commercial entities. It is legiti- By Girish N Basidoni, TestingCzars By Shubha Sridhar, Torry Harris By Bhaskar Bakthavatsalu,
mate for a broadband provider (who claims to be an ISP) to place re- Business Solutions Check Point Software Technologies
strictions on the consumer for how he or she uses the bandwidth that 08 [Infocus]
T:510.440.8249, F:510.440.8276 28 Test Automation Framework
they pay for, but not to place restrictions on the content provider, as 38 Delivering Broadband to
the move will kill many content providers. So, in a longer run what 11 [VC Chakra] Challenges in the Ever Global MDUs
Google targets is ‘survival of the fittest’. Thus, many content Sunny Gupta Co-founded Changing Technology By Mileend Gadkari,
providers and startups would have to collaborate with these big play- Apptio Raises $16.5 Million Scenario Sigma Designs
ers and survive on a revenue share.
siliconindia in Series C Venture Funding By Ramesh Krish,
Well, Eric Schmidt is a smart guy who always accomplishes his
October 2010, volume 13-10 (ISSN 1091-9503)
vision with tremendous patience and perseverance. So Google and DataSphere Raises $10 Indium Software India 40 [Business]
Published monthly by siliconindia, Inc.
Verizon will definitely evangelize a rosy picture of their proposal Million in Series C Financing 31 Enriching the
towards FCC. Having known the fact that the U.S. has a notorious
NPD for Handheld Devices Entrepreneurial Ecosystem
history of handsome money being spent on lobbyists ($3.5 billion By Tushar Bhatnagar, By Jaya Smitha Menon
12 [CEO Spotlight] Infinite Computer Solutions
last year), we can look forward to lobbyists too aggressively evan- Software Testing Riding on
gelizing Google’s vision. the Era Transformation A Case for Policy Initiative 42 [CIO Profile]
32
Even in the past, a serpent seduced Eve to lobby and persuade Delivering Broadband to
IVI & Android : The key for Indian Fabless Company
Adam to have the fruit of knowledge, which was the biggest mistake
Global MDUs
To subscribe to siliconindia
Visit www.siliconindia.com or send email to that doomed the mankind. Beware of lobbyists! Google’s current drivers of embedded industry By Ganapathy Subramaniam, Cos-
subscription@siliconindia.com By Jaya Smitha Menon
proposal to FCC reminds me of the Serpent that can put to doom mic Circuits
Copyright © 2009 siliconindia, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction many entrepreneurs who survive on the Internet. The world has to 20 [Feature]
wake up and continue to evangelize retaining Internet as an open Software Testing Riding on 44 [Entrepreneur 101]
in whole or part of any text, photography or illustrations without writ-
34
[Management]
Finding Opportunities in
ten permission from the publisher is prohibited.The publisher assumes
no responsibility for unsolicited manuscripts, photographs or illustra- medium. Let’s not make another big mistake, which will have a ter- the Era Transformation The Power of Whole Brain
tions. Views and opinions expressed in this publication are not neces-
sarily those of the magazine and accordingly, no liability is assumed by
rible backlash on our own freedom!
Thinking Social Good
the publisher thereof.
22 [VC Talk] By Gunjan Sinha
By Prashad Deshpande,
siliconindia’s circulation is audited and certified Startups We Would Like to Fund Empowered Learning Systems
by BPA International. siliconindia is available through ByJagannathRao,HeadstartVentures 46 [SI 20 Profile]
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 October 2010
 in m y
opinion
Software Testing Business
Emerging drivers changing landscape of
oftware testing is omnipresent & the importance of software testing is undoubted. Testing process is one of the
oldest forms of verification & validation carried out by software developer, engineer, practitioner or end user.
S Landscape of software testing has changed metamorphically with revolution of technology, business
expectations, and IT adaptations from domain companies, methodology & ever increasing complexity of applications.
Emerging drivers which are redefin-
ing landscape of Software Testing
Rapid Adoption of IT systems: Glob-
Business
ally as more and more systems are being
digitized, the need for testers has in-
creased drastically. The availability of
the resource pool that has the necessary
domain knowledge is also shrinking
which has lead to a resource pool
crunch. That said, it would be paramount
to ramp-up Business Analysts and Prod-
uct Primes to acquire the pre-existing
knowledge within the domain and inno-
vate upon that knowledge. Bringing
testers up to speed then becomes the re-
sponsibilities of the Analysts and Prod-
uct primes. The secondary problem of
non-availability of Skilled (automation
scripts) testers to perform the necessary
functions gives rise to a requirement of
machine based frameworks to fill in the
gaps of non-availability of the resource
pool. This gives rise to the lateral indus-
try of automated code generation for de-
velopers speeding solution development
as well as automated test case generation
aiding the Quality Assurance folks.
edge transfer: When the knowledge
Impedance mis-match during knowl-
transfer of the Domain has to flow from
the Analyst to the developers and testers,
the impedance mis-match in translating
the knowledge in terms of articulating
siliconindia
|6| October 2010
By Girish N Basidoni
The author is President & CEO, TestingCzars
the nuances of the innovation and the ca-
pability of a tester (as per say) to under-
stand and assimilate that knowledge into
the respective Testcases is mind numb-
ingly high. This high mismatch in what
was expected to be built and tested and
what landed up getting built and tested
will lead to heartburns during acceptance
scenarios.
Complexity of the Product: The choice
of the technologies and frameworks and
platforms used in manufacturing and
building the solution also adds up to the
complexity of the test cycles. ERP im-
plementation, PDLC of a Enterprise
Product, SaaS based Solution Delivery,
Cloud Compute enabled solutions, Data
Center Management, Legacy Integration
etc, are not only rich in semantics from
a Domain perspective but are also com-
plex to assimilate to understand the
breadth and depth of testing strategies
required to validate and provide assur-
ance of quality.
Heterogeneity of the Systems: Added
to the complexity of the product, the IT
eco-system in which these product op-
erates today are made up of different
systems from vendors such as IBM, Or-
acle, Microsoft, SAP, Sun and HP (in-
cluding home grown solution) that
contains various platforms patched up
together through ESB and SOA integra-
tion. Even the choice of Operating sys-
tems and hardware platforms have be-
come varied that performing a
configuration and version compatibility
test for any given platform has started to
look daunting
gain cycles: Typically the Product de-
Shrinking GTM and Focus on short
velopment lifecycles and Go to market
cycles are shrinking in the light of ever
changing business dynamics. Everyone
wants to put the product out in the mar-
ket as soon as possible capturing the cus-
tomer share as soon to gain control on
the changing business dynamics. Agility,
it seems is paying dividends for such
short GTMs and providing a quick ROI.
SaaS based and On-line solutions are
moving towards perpetual beta plat-
forms which can rapidly adapt to the
customers’ needs. This also holds true
for ERP implementation cycles which
are shrinking by the day. What used to
take 5 years is now being reduced to 1
year implementation cycles with rapid
customizations.
Shrinking IT Budgets: Discretionary
spend has been monitored more closely
and also the overall IT budget is shrink-
ing by the day. CFOs are breathing down
the CTOs neck for efficiency and pro-
ductivity for every dollar spent. This has
lead to cost cutting in terms of support
staff (people) and reduction in spend of
applications and products (license).
CFOs are moving away from making
any large capital commitments at the
outset impacting high CAPEX vendors.
Converting the fixed costs to variable
cost is the Financial Officers edict across
LOBs.
Pressures: Global recession being the
Global Recession Driving Margin
new reality, the pressure on margins
(not to mention survival) is high. Cor-
porates are looking for operational ef-
ficiencies to increase the margins to
retain the operating profits while the
top line sinks. Increasingly Corporates
are betting on digitizing and automat-
ing all processes that can be automated
which shall convert to cost savings by
downsizing the cost centers.
ucts and Service: The general toler-
Demand for Highly Reliable Prod-
ance for a good quality product has
come down. Consumers are demanding
‘excellent’ quality products. In effect,
what was excellent yesterday is just
good enough today. Reliability and Rel-
evance are the two parameters that are
driving the world markets. If a product
or a solution is not meeting the stan-
dards of ‘excellence’ then there is no
place in the market for the solution.
Corporates are trying to leverage ma-
chines (computers, robots, software) as
much as possible to automate the core
solutions. Automation unlike manual
processes provides a high degree of re-
liability when employed throughout the
production cycle.
Regulatory Compliance: With the in-
crease in the number of regulations in
any given sector (HIPAA, SOX, GLBA
etc...) the burden of certifying the prod-
uct, platform, application or service has
increased dramatically. This has led to
the amortization of working capital
from core production cycles (bread and
butter cycles) to compliance activities.
Given the same capital budget (which
seemingly is shrinking as we speak),
the number of activities in production
has increased to cater to the compliance
demands. Corporates again are seeking
automated compliance testing tools to
ensure certification which increases the
operational efficiencies. The compli-
ance requirements has made the Cor-
porates to refactor the dynamics of a
verification and validation LOB from a
cost center to a value center.
Compliance: The threat levels have
Increased Threats and Security
been ever increasing and the types and
nature of threats have become innova-
tive. Security Compliance has become
a core activity of any validation cycles
for products and solutions. Penetration
testing, Functional Security, Security
Standards Compliance and more adds
to the release and build test cycles as a
natural PDLC flow increasing the num-
ber of core activities to be performed by
“Testing has become a change agent addressing
risk early on in the lifecycle and continually
assuring reliability, relevance and compliance
apart from providing functional acceptance and
assurance for the product or service. “
QA. Corporates and QA departments
are seeking automation platforms in
these and other areas to release enough
bandwidth of the existing people so that
what has to be (and can be) performed
as manual verification has enough peo-
ple available to perform.
As a result of the above drivers the
demands of the broader industry can be
captured as follows:
 Increased specialization of product
base moving the definition owners
up the pyramid (moving from testers
to analysts and product primes).
 Business analysts and Product Man-
agers are demanding tools which en-
ables them to create test scenarios
without having to write code
 Demand for extreme traceability of
Testcases and test steps to the re-
quirements has increased rapidly.
Demand for pre-built adapters and

catalogs which can readily integrate
and work as expected during last
mile integration is on the rise
 Virtualization and Automation is be-
coming the norm of the day.
 Demand for baseline Testcases cov-
ering top few probable customiza-
tions of a large product base is
increasing. Pre-built Test Content

‘cartridges’ are the need of the day.
Demand for subscription based
usage is on the rise.
 Demand for outsourcing the valida-
tion and assurance and SLA man-
agement is on the rise.
 Demand for metrics based reports
with high degree of SLA while en-
abling automation is on the rise.
 Demand for regulatory compli-
ance catalogs for verification is on
the rise.
 Growing need for security verifica-
tions as part of the automation solu-
tions is been on the rise.
Simply to put, testing is not a gating
function anymore. Testing has become
ever more so an inherent QoS (Quality
of Service) across and throughout the life
cycle of production or service delivery.
Testing has become a change agent ad-
dressing risk early on in the lifecycle and
continually assuring reliability, relevance
and compliance apart from providing
functional acceptance and assurance for
the product or service. Testing as per say
has become a value creator and quality
differentiator for the end product to pro-
vide the required edge to compete in the
market place of excellence. si
siliconindia
|7| October 2010
in
B I
India to become largest Security Market by 2020
y 2020 India will become one of
the largest players in global
homeland security market, ac-
cording to a recent study.
The Associated Chambers of Com-
merce and Industry of India (AS-
SOCHAM) & KPMG report titled
‘Homeland Security in India’ says, India,
along with Britain, Germany and France
will out grow U.S., which currently en-
joys a 34 percent market share in this
filed.
India, which currently shares 3.6
percent of global homeland expenditure,
will require to take it upwardly to an ex-
tent of six percent over the next decade
to effectively take on emerging security
risks. The report has predicted that
China, India, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and
UAE are expected to exhibit the fastest
market growth in this sector, driven by a
I
Indian Entrepreneur Makes Device to Help Cerebral Palsy Kids Talk
nnovation for a common good and
cause is not everyone’s cup of tea.
But Ajit Narayan is one among
those who thought of the differently
abled. His company Invention Lab
has invented Avaz, one of the
most useful talking de-
vices for those affected
with cerebral palsy.
Avaz, which means
‘speech’, gives speech to a
child. The device is
mounted on the wheelchair
which the child uses. It can
be kept on the desk or on the
child’s lap. They used the T9
method used in mobile phones. These
children do not have the dexterity to
touch the exact word on the screen. So
once they touch anywhere on the
screen, a color moves to each word
siliconindia
|8| October 2010
combination of economic growth along
with increasing threats of terrorism faced
by these countries.
“By 2020 about six percent of global
procurement in the field of homeland se-
curity is expected to be emanated from
India,” says Dr. Swati Piramal, Presi-
dent, ASSOCHAM.
As per current estimates homeland
security expenditure projection as a per-
centage of global spending in case of
India is 3.6 percent, France - 3.4 percent,
Germany - 3.7 percent, Saudi Arabia -
4.5 percent, UK - 3.9 percent, China -
5.2 percent, U.S. - 33.3 percent.
The report added that India offers a
large potential for firms looking to lever-
age the opportunity manifested in this
sector in the country on account of high
GDP growth, challenging relationship
with neighbors that are unlikely to re-
and when it reaches the right word,
they need to touch again, anywhere on
the screen.
Visiting the disabled at Vidyasagar
(formerly called the Spastic Society of
India) and getting
to know those
children with nor-
mal intelligence
who could not
express them-
selves in
words, gave
birth to the
idea of design-
ing a communication device sim-
ilar to what is used in the U.S. but is
affordable to people here. Spending
hours with the children at Vidyasagar
and doing experiments with the up-
dated prototypes at every session over
in
Teens develop washing machine with junk,
runs without electricity
solve in the years ahead, aging and ob-
solete equipment and high spending on
n a drive towards raising aware- useful in big textile industries. We’re
modernizing military capabilities and in-
ness about environmental issues, planning to give our idea to one of
dustrial infrastructure.
two teens, Sourabh Siyal and India’s leading garment manufacturing
The paper points out that a signifi-
Tushar Agarwal, have developed a units,” says Siyal, who too wants to
cant market opportunity exists in several
washing machine made out of junk pursue research work in the field of
domains consisting of larger homeland
material. The machine, named ‘Eco- science.
security sector, such as police reforms,
wash’, runs on mechanical and kinetic In another such showcase of inno-
critical infrastructure protection and
energy, without the use of electricity. vation four students of from a school
counter-terrorism activities. Homeland
“The main washtub is built with in Bangalore, under the guidance of
security will have to enhance further
junk materials like discarded plastic their Physics teacher developed an
since India has opened up its nuclear
bottles and a pulley is attached to the ‘Earthquake predictor’. “The earth-
sector post signing Civil Nuclear Co-op-
plastic bottle to run the machine. The quake predictor is nothing but a
eration Treaty with U.S. which is likely
pulley moves with the help of kinetic borewell. The borewell is attached to a
to create a large demand for nuclear/ra-
energy and helps to wash clothes,” ex- buzzer. The buzzer makes sound if the
diological mitigation approaches. Nu-
plains Agarwal, who wants to be a sci- underground water level increases,
clear market requirements will be
entific innovator. which means that the movement of ment of lava will force the water level
extremely critical and India will have to
“Our idea is to do away with elec- lava in the underground is moving at a to increase, which in turn will make
spend a great deal to keep its nuclear in-
tricity and come up with an alterna- faster rate, an indication of the likeli- the buzzer give out signals,” said Sub-
stallations completely fool-proof against
tive. The washing machine can be hood of an earthquake. The fast move- ramanian K, one of the students. si
all possible security threats.
two years, they launched Avaz in Feb-
ruary 2010 at Vidyasagar.
Upon completing his graduation
from Indian Institute of Technology-
Madras, Narayan went to U.S. with
the plan of returning to India after a
few years to be an entrepreneur. In
2007, Ajit was back in India and with
a few like-minded friends, he started
Invention Labs. “I was very im-
pressed with the way America had
adopted technology in day-to-day life.
I wanted to invent things that would
improve the lives of Indians. So it was
my dream that I should start a com-
pany that would create products
which are useful to the people of
India,” said Ajit.
Invention Labs’ next plan is Avaz
for autism, dyslexia, mental retarda-
tion and people affected by stroke. si

in
M A
India lost $27 Billion Worth Deals in
Soured Mergers
ergers and acquisition had a
major role in the post reces-
sion economy. But the Indian
economy has also seen some major fall
off in terms of mergers. Merger deals
worth $27 billion have soured so far this
year in India. According to the data com-
piled by research firm VCC Edge, as
many as nine deals have been called off
this far in 2010.
The biggest non-starter was that of
Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Indus-
tries’(RIL) $14.5 billion bid for Lyon-
dellBasell. This was followed - in terms
of deal value - by the cancellation of his
younger brother Anil Ambani run Re-
liance Communications’ $10.8 billion
merger deal with GTL Infra.”The failure
of the mega deals was primarily due to
valuation concern. Management control
issues and strategic unsuitability of the
deals was another reason for cancella-
D
Poor Logistics costs India $65 Billion Annually
espite the Indian retail sector
being in the high-growth
mode, the country is losing
$65 billion every year due to ineffi-
cient supply chain systems. The sup-
ply chain costs in India are about 12
percent to 13 percent of the gross do-
mestic product (GDP) compared
with 7 percent to 8 percent of GDP
in developed countries, according to
a report titled, ‘Global competitive-
ness of retail supply chain-Chal-
lenges, Strategies and
Recommendations’ published by in-
dustry body Confederation of Indian
Industry (CII) and Amarthi Consult-
ing.
The report says that India is at
siliconindia
|10|
October 2010
tions”, says SMC Capitals Equity Head,
Jagannathan Thunuguntla.
Interestingly, the Ambani brothers, who
have been most active in merger and ac-
quisition activity this year, accounted for
over $25 billion of the deals in 2010 that
could not take off in 2010.
Mukesh Ambani led RIL, last
month, had made foray in the hospitality
sector by picking up a 14.18 stake in
EIH Ltd, promoted by Oberoi group of
hotels and resorts. However, early in the
year, EIH also witnessed a deal cancel-
lation of $272 million in which Max
Hospital’s founder and chairman Analjit
Singh was interested in 17 per cent stake
in the hospitality major.
Another significant deal that did not
work was Singapore’s GIC Special In-
vestments’ $84.7 million bid for 6.58 per
cent stake in Fortis Healthcare. Naveen
Jindal led Jindal Steel and Power (JSPL)
47th position on logistics and is be-
hind countries such as Japan, U.S.,
Germany and China. The supply
chain costs in India deal with the
procurement, manufacture and dis-
tribution of products and services,
and drive the success of the retail
sector.
The retail industry in India,
which is expected to grow over $879
billion by 2018, is a $410 billion
market. Food and groceries account
for 70 percent of the retailed items
followed by textile and apparel at
seven percent. The textiles and ap-
parel segment represents about 40
percent of the organized sector,
which account 95 percent of the re-
$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
was also denied a stake in Zimbabwe
Iron & Steel, estimated to be in the
range of $600 million- $1 billion by the
government, as it did not approve of
selling the ailing company to large cor-
porates.
Other transactions that turned sour
so far this year include – U.S. based
Scripps Networks Interactive’s attempt
to buy stake in NDTV Lifestyle, drug
major Abott Laboratories’ interest in
Wockhardt, multiplex chain PVR Cine-
mas’ bid for DT Cinemas and Ingersoll
Rand USA’s attempt to merge the In-
dian subsidiary into itself.
tail sector.
The retail industry in India faces
supply chain challenges like inade-
quate supply chain infrastructure,
complex taxation laws, high levels of
intermediaries, product proliferation
and lack of supply chain visibility.
Some of the key recommendations of
the report are improving supply
chain infrastructure, implementation
of goods and services tax (GST), re-
ducing intermediaries, and adopting
green supply chain practices. Green
supply chains involve integrating en-
vironmental thinking into the core
operations of a company, starting
from material sourcing to delivery to
end-of-life recycling. si
Sunny Gupta Co-founded Apptio Raises
$16.5 Million in Series C Venture Funding
pptio, a Bellevue,
Washington- based
provider of SaaS de-
livered Technology Business
Management (TBM) solutions
has closed a $16.5 million Se-
ries C round funding. The fi-
nancing round was led by
Shasta Ventures, with partici-
pation from all the current in-
vestors including Andreessen
Horowitz, Greylock Partners
and Madrona Venture Group. This
brings the total funding to $37.5 mil-
lion.
The capital from funding will be
used to scale Apptio’s business across
all functions and enter new markets
with its solutions, which help busi-
nesses manage the cost, quality and
D
DataSphere Raises $10 Million in Series C Financing
ataSphere, a provider of hy-
perlocal web technology and
sales solutions for media
companies, has raised $10 million in
Series C round of financing led by
OVP venture partners with the par-
ticipation from existing investors Ig-
nition Partners and Fisher
Communications. This brings DataS-
phere’s total backing to over $20 mil-
lion. The Bellevue-based company
will use the funding to expand their
presence in the $100 billion U.S.
local advertising market and con-
tinue building its platform for hyper-
local news.
Founded in 2006, DataSphere en-
ables TV stations to set up hyperlocal
websites and then monetize them. Its
network of over 750 neighborhood
websites feature information about
value of IT services.
The company claims
the additional funding
comes on the heels of
300 percent year-
over-year bookings
growth.
“We see TBM as
a multi-billion dollar
market. Despite the
ever increasing cost
Sunny Gupta
of IT, the Global 2000
companies spend anywhere between
$200 million and $6 billion on IT and
with new concepts like cloud comput-
ing and virtualization, management of
IT is proving to be a huge challenge,”
explains Sunny Gupta, Co-Founder
and CEO, Apptio. Thus, its TBM so-
lutions provide a single source of
local news and events
drawn both from commu-
nity residents and the col-
lective talents of
hundreds of top tier pro-
fessional reporters at its
media partners. Cur-
rently, DataSphere counts
Gannet, Raycom Media,
Local TV, Fisher Com-
munications and Hub-
Satbir Khanuja
bard Broadcasting as its
key customers. Currently
on a hiring spree, it expects to add
150 employees to its current 220 by
January. But it believes that the big
challenge is that, in order to be suc-
cessful in this space, companies (or
individuals) have to possess a wide
range of skills and be able to perform
at a high level across them all: tech-
record for both IT financial and oper-
ational data, data analytics to drive
real-time decision support, and appli-
cations to automate TBM challenges
and streamline business processes.
Apptio delivers this technology on-de-
mand in a SaaS model to maximize
business value.
At present, the company has expe-
rience strong traction from Global
2000 across all industries and its cus-
tomer roster includes Alaska Airlines,
Blue Cross Blue Shield, BNP Paribas,
Cisco, Expedia, Hallmark, JPMorgan
Chase and Starbucks.
With approximately 85 employees
currently, Apptio plans to hire roughly
30 employees by the end of 2010
across all functions - sales, marketing,
R&D and customer success.
nology, content, sales,
creative and many more.
“We’ve experienced a
tremendous demand for
our services. Having
launched over 300 neigh-
borhood websites over
the last 60 days, we’re on
track to provide neighbor-
hood news to more than
1,200 communities by the
end of the year,” said Sat-
bir Khanuja, CEO of
DataSphere. With severe competition
from blogging networks like Next
Door Media to community news net-
works like AOL-backed Patch.com,
DataSphere has devised a “super
smart” strategy through its partner-
ships with existing media companies
like Fisher. si
siliconindia
|11|
October 2010
CEO
spotlight
CEO
spotlight

T A
Treating Your Student Like
a Customer
his might as well be the
title of a hit reality TV
show for such are the
trends shaping the educa-
tion industry around the
world today. The transformation of ed-
ucational delivery systems and the busi-
ness of education on the whole have
been remarkable, both for the student as
well as all the stakeholders involved in
course credits and funding along with
them. There were also the problems of
dropouts. When this happened the loss
assumes multiple significances as: the
schools lost the money they invested in
attracting the student, the course fees,
and the schools also took a beating on
their attrition rates. With federal regu-
lations putting underperforming
schools and schools with high attrition
IVI & Android : The Key Drivers
of Embedded Industry
fter a flat growth over the
past two years, the em-
bedded industry is at an
inflection point now and I
see several factors driving
this. The biggest traction I see at this
point is In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI).
Several large automobile players such as
BMW and Mercedes are investing heav-
ily into it and is working in close collab-
ing up. I think in the network infrastruc-
ture side people are thinking about how
to cater to increasing demands of the
rural market, thus seeing a sweet spot for
themselves. Finally, the biggest driving
force for the embedded industry is An-
droid. With the smartphone market tak-
ing off in a big way, with Android, the
possibilities is unlimited.
While the future does paint a rosy

Moving away from

the process. Moving away oration with giants like Intel. But I see a picture for this industry, it still struggles
from traditional campus based with a big challenge – dearth
education- online learning has
traditional campus based The industry, especially the of quality professionals. The

embedded one, has a

Babu Thiagarajan is the
founder and CEO of
QuScient Technologies.
education- online learning
opened new avenues for the industry, especially the em-
employed, and individuals bedded one, has a shortage of
constrained by time, to further
has opened new avenues for shortage of quality quality engineers who can

engineers who can people

their careers. The perception people who can conceive an
and recognition of online the employed, and idea. For the engineers today
courses in India might not be
as high as in some of the west- individuals constrained by who can conceive an idea. understanding the complete
product itself is a challenge.
ern countries, but then, how
far behind can India be in this
time, to further their careers. lot of mid-sized company now actively
Though most companies are
looking at university models of evan-
global age? looking to take a bite of this pie. At Win- gelizing technology, a lot remains to be
But, newer methods of education under the scanner, most schools, espe- dRiver we are bullish on what IVI has to done. The other challenge is inability of Venkatesh Kumaran is the
and the options that they bring create a cially the smaller ones, admitted that offer and so are several Indian OEMs. Indian companies to develop a product Country Manager – India,
whole new set of challenges to the es- they faced 30 – 50 percent attrition is- The second trend in this space is building that is global in nature. When can we WindRiver. A developer of
tablished order. Student communica- sues but were never able to identify the Pico LTE base stations which is on a rise see another Huawei in India? embedded and mobile
tion, course governance, student reasons. with the advent of 4G. Today, the macros Perhaps this is where entrepreneur- software, WindRiver was
attrition, and measuring satisfaction How long before schools in India for 4G are all with top companies like ship plays an important role. The next acquired by Intel in 2009
will become the top issues facing face the same issues? Number portabil- Motorola, NSN, Alcatel Lucent and killer product in this space will proba-
schools with a geographically distrib- ity is a reality; is it safe to assume that Huawei but they do not focus on Pico bly from a startup. From an entrepre-
uted student populace. These were school credit transfers will be just base stations that complement these neur stand point it is extremely
also, some of the biggest problems around the corner? Schools and col- macros. For example if a single IT park important that we come up with an idea
faced by QuScient’s higher education leges need to take a holistic view of has 500 subscribers (subs) in one base for next generation product that the
clients in the U.S. and UK. In these their student problems. The right way stations and sees a demand for additional world can embrace. To start with they
countries a student is provided with the forward would be student relationship 50 subs then instead setting up another need to capture window that major
option of transferring to another school management systems – know your stu- macro of 500 subs just set up a pico base MNCs are struggling with. If they get
if they were unhappy with the current dents and anticipate their needs. Keep station. Similarly, solar power based sta- the right idea and timing for the prod-
school, and while doing so, take their up with your students. si tions in rural areas is an idea that is pick- uct there will be no holding back. si

siliconindia
|12|
October 2010 siliconindia
|13|
October 2010
COVER STORY
Removing
Kinks
the
Outsourced
in
Manufacturing
B
By Vimali Swamy
usinesses and supply chains have become sub-
stantially more global over the last decade, but
have manufacturers been able to cope up with
this rapid growth? Between 1995 and 2007,
the number of transnational companies more
than doubled, from 38,000 to 79,000, and foreign sub-
sidiaries nearly tripled, from 265,000 to 790,000. In addi-
tion to spreading geographically, supply chains now
involve more companies. Nearly 80 percent of executives
expect the number of collaborative relationships with third
parties to increase. Currently, an ever-broader range of ac-
tivities are being outsourced: between 2007 and 2010,
R&D outsourcing is forecasted to increase by 65 percent,
and engineering services and product-design projects will
increase by more than 80 percent. Supply chains must also
Indu Navar contend with rapidly expanding and contracting product
CEO & Founder portfolios. In the consumer products industry, for example,
Serus Corporation product introductions increased by 17 percent in 2006 –
operations, and finance to manage and forth, over its product platform.
Serus at a glance outsourced partners – all driven by Furthermore, the Serus approach
single source of truth. The Serus manages all the financial informa-
Founded: 2005
product is deployed as an affordable tion, like the actual cost or the in-
CEO: Indu Navar
cloud solution, as opposed to expen- voice that is paid to the outsourced
Headquarters: Sunnyvale, CA
sive enterprise software deployment manufacturers and it then collabo-
Other Offices: Bangalore, India
or a custom one off software imple- rates with the systems at the partner
Employees: Over 50
mentation. “We have built an ecosys- and supplier site.
Customers: Cisco, NVIDIA,
tem of suppliers enabling our The company’s flagship solution
AMD, Akustica, Amalfi Semi-
customers a plug-and-play informa- is an Intelligent Operations Manage-
conductor, Ambarella, Avinet,
tion exchange. We have operations in ment (IOM) application suite. At the
Atheros, Boston Scientific,
North America and India; we estab- center of the IOM offering is a B2B
Canesta and more
lished an India operation to take ad- Hub that provides real-time data ag-
Investors: OBC ventures, Sam-
vantage of engineering brilliance and gregation and content management,
sung Ventures and Diamond
to potentially serve the growing man- including facilities for data cleaning
Head.
ufacturing sector. Along with our and error resolution, combined with
Funding: $19 Million
products and services, we include in- collaboration across the extended en-
Website: www.serus.com
dustry best practices and domain ex- terprise. Its customers recognize that
pertise,” says Indu Navar, CEO of IOM removes the need for large,
more than double the 2005 rate. Port-
and Founder of Serus. complex spreadsheets that are diffi-
folio rationalization is eliminating
SKUs (Stock Keeping Units) almost
as fast. Together, these shifts are cre-
Analysts recognize Manufacturing Operations
ating constant turmoil. Confronted Management as a $4 billion market and this is
with such daunting complexities,
supply chain executives face five
just in the semiconductor, hi-tech electrical
major challenges — Cost contain-
manufacturer and medical devices
ment, supply chain visibility, risk
management, increasing customer
sector alone.
demands, and globalization. These
are exactly the challenges that Serus
cult to maintain and audit, and that
looks to address with its wide array
the IOM solution includes a set of
The Great Manufacturing
of solutions.
When a company deploys the Serus modules for business functions on a
Challenge
Serus, a Sunnyvale based com-
solution, it addresses an organiza- platform that supports advanced re-
pany that provides enterprises with a
tion’s three main pain points, opera- porting, decision-making, and ac-
proven end-to-end Intelligent Opera-
tions, finance, and IT. “What we do tion-taking.
tions Management solutions has a lot
is help companies manage their op- Serus’ Global Operations Execu-
to say on this topic. Serus has been a
erations by running our solution tion Suite provides real-time inven-
pioneer of technology and managed
alongside their existing ERP sys- tory management and operational
services for companies with distrib-
tems, be it Oracle or SAP, in support intelligence. It provides financial in-
uted or outsourced manufacturing
of the manufacturing efforts that ventory transparency, accurate calcu-
operations and have been delivering
takes place outside their four walls, lation of inventory exposure,
solutions for the past 9 years. The
which includes collaboration with predictability, automated reconcilia-
Serus SaaS solutions enable efficient
their extended outsourced partners,” tion, and SOX compliance.
automated collaboration, execution,
explains Indu. In operations manage- To reduce the time associated
and decision making across global
ment and IT, Serus helps in execut- with New Product Introductions
supply and distribution networks,
ing everyday tasks like providing (NPI) a challenge that all companies
saving millions of dollars for manu-
day-to-day information product spec- face, Serus has recently introduced a
facturers. Serus provides an end-to-
ifications, testing scripts, and send- Global Manufacturing Process Man-
end application that satisfies
ing other project information to the agement (GMPM) solution that en-
inter-company business process re-
partners, thereby, managing all the sures Bill of Materials (BOM) and
quirements for product engineering,
inventory information that goes back manufacturing specification changes
siliconindia
|15|
October 2010
COVER STORY
are tightly integrated with partner
manufacturing execution systems.
The end result is faster response
times associated with changes and a
decrease in manufacturing scrap. To
complete Serus’ solution is the abil-
ity to provide an Execution Planning
suite, closing the gap between
weekly or monthly planning and day-
to-day execution. The solution suite
is built on a closed loop platform that
validates that the instructions were
executed correctly.
Serus deploys its product through
a private or public cloud computing
platform which is determined by the
client’s requirement. Having a cloud
based solution also adds an edge to
the product as Serus is able to man-
age everything from deployment to
upgrading from a remote site. “It al-
lows us to take responsibility for
everything that is happening in the
customer site. This is unlike the old
school software where there is no
feedback loop and the ownership and
partnership is missing,” says Indu.
Today, the company’s technology,
domain, and operations expertise
have empowered operations man-
agers and executives at semiconduc-
tor companies, contract
manufacturing organizations, high-
tech OEMs within the Fortune 500,
and mid-market companies, to meet
the demands of their market more ef-
ficiently. With its state of the art Sup-
ply Chain solutions, Serus has
siliconindia
|16|
October 2010
improved inventory visibility at sub-
contract manufactures from 85 per-
cent to 99.5 percent. Being able to
trace the exact status of any lot in any
location at any point in time has im-
proved product quality, customer
service levels and financial reporting.
Additional real-time operations data
has helped with decision support, al-
lowing for a quick response to sup-
ply and demand changes,
dramatically improving a company’s
ability to hit target ship dates – and
most importantly keep all their cus-
tomers happy. A supply-chain dash-
board with embedded analytics has
also enabled management by excep-
tion improving decision making and
ensuring trading partners comply
with manufacturing specifications.
From Product engineering, to inven-
tory control, from finance, supply
chain operations, to logistics, and
from operations planning, sales oper-
ations to ERP, Serus helps a company
efficiently automate every step of the
manufacturing process.
When founding Serus, Indu had
established firm relationships with
some of the company’s early clients,
such as: Cisco, Spansion, Quantum,
and a few others, who were early
adopters of the company’s products
and services. Today, with a global
clientele that includes top players
like AMD, Boston Scientific, Cisco,
Flextronics, Juniper Networks,
nVidia, Thermo Fisher and Wente
Vineyards. Serus has firmed its
foothold in four major business ver-
ticals — Semiconductors, Hi-tech
manufacturers, medical devices and
consumer packaged goods.
“Systems have to continue to get
revitalized. They don’t have to get
replaced. Serus is built in a very
modular, extensible way. It runs on
rational, commodity server prod-
ucts,” says Clay Cipione, former
Chief Information Officer, AMD.
Solution: The Serus Way in Sup-
Flextronics, a leading Electronics
port of High Tech Vertical
Manufacturing Services (EMS)
provider with operations and services
through a network of facilities in 30
countries on four continents, ex-
panded their long-term relationship
with Serus to include an Enterprise
partnership. Flextronics chose to de-
ploy Serus’ solution enterprise wide
across their automotive, computing,
consumer digital, industrial, infra-
structure, medical and mobile OEMs.
Flextronics, like other high tech com-
panies, faced great challenges as they
aimed to optimize their operations
and inventory levels. The Serus Lean
Inventory Optimization Network
So What do Clients Have to Say About Serus Solutions?
One of the turnkey executions of Serus
was at NVIDIA, a world leader in visual
computing, they talk about the profi-
ciency of Serus’ solutions, Ranga Ja-
yaraman, CIO, NVIDIA says, “The
custom application NVIDIA had previ-
ously used to define chip BOMs and
the manual processes to communicate
the BOMs and production steps to
manufacturing partners were error
prone and time consuming. The Serus
solution suite provided a commercial
alternative to additional custom devel-
opment. It has resulted in significant
reductions in BOM creation and main-
tenance times and errors. It also en-
abled the process to be executed
outside of Santa Clara, allowing the
Product Engineering team to focus on
driving yield improvements. I am
pleased with the Serus team’s deep
knowledge of semiconductor processes
and their high quality deployment on
an aggressive timetable.”
John Fernandez, Director of Fi-
nance at Audience, the leading
provider of advanced voice and audio
Serus’ real time technology provides
instantaneous automated transactions,
co-managed inventory, and performance
measurements across a company's worldwide
value chain.
(LION) solution helps customers
achieve the benefits of lean manu-
facturing methodologies, including
improved demand and supply chain
visibility, optimized inventory levels,
and improved product delivery times.
LION contains embedded, propri-
etary, industry-leading lean business
rules and algorithms developed by
Serus’ partner, FlowVision LLC.
The LION web based Decision
processors for the mobile and telecom
marketplace, says that “After a thor-
ough evaluation of various vendors, we
selected Serus as our operations and
planning system…Serus will not only
enable us to transition to a scalable op-
erations model, but it will also allow us
to implement best practices in out-
sourced manufacturing and testing for
fabless semiconductor companies.
Their out-of-the box tight integration
with Microsoft Dynamics Financials en-
sures quick implementation of our new
system within our organization”.
Jason Goodelle, Director of Opera-
tions at Sand9, a fabless semiconduc-
tor company that develops products
based on high performance MEMS res-
onator technology, says that “After
evaluating multiple options, we se-
lected Serus as our core operations sys-
tem. The Serus solution will enable us
to implement a fast ramp to produc-
tion stage. In addition, its SaaS model
allows us to deploy a world-class sys-
tem for fabless semiconductor manu-
facturers without upfront IT
Center dashboard and alerting mech-
anism allowed Flextronics to opti-
mally size their inventory to ensure
compliance with all their ongoing
supply commitments. It provided
collaboration both internally with re-
mote operations as well as with busi-
ness partners. The integrated B2B
Hub aggregated forecast and ship-
ment information across customers
and provided complete visibility into
investment and at variable costs, deliv-
ering a quicker ROI. Finally, with the
quick implementation timeline of the
Serus solution, we can deploy our ex-
isting resources and go-live with the
system in a short timeframe, before
they get extremely busy as we enter
production stage”.
Alan Marten, Senior Vice President
& General Manager at Smart Modular,
a leading independent manufacturer of
memory modules and solid-state stor-
age products, including solid-state
drives (SSDs), said that “Global supply
chain operations are key to our busi-
ness, so it’s imperative that we have
real-time data that helps aid in the
process of making critical decisions.
That’s where LION comes in. Ulti-
mately, these decisions benefit our cus-
tomers,” said, Memory Business Unit.
“Our deployment of the Serus’ LION
suite not only enhances what we be-
lieve is a state-of-the-art IT infrastruc-
ture to better serve our customers, but
it also helps us maintain our overall op-
erational excellence.”
siliconindia
|17|
October 2010
COVER STORY
required inventory levels. The Lean
Planning module provided all users a
complete view of inventory levels
and the ability to conduct what-if
scenarios, while the Lean Triggering
module initiated procurement trig-
gers needed to support changing re-
quirements. “LION has helped
Flextronics to dramatically improve
efficiency in collaborating with the
customer to optimize inventory and
service levels,” says Jason McLelan,
Vice President of procurement at
Flextronics.
Addressing the most critical chal-
Serus: Looking into the Future
lenges faced by the manufacturing
industry for the last nice years, the
company has not found any serious
competition as Indu believes that
Serus is the only company to provide
subscription solution with an end-to-
end footprint for its customers to
manage their outsourced require-
ments. The only competition that she
experiences from time-to-time is
when companies try replicating the
solution in-house. “A majority of the
competition comes from the clients
trying to modify excel or create a
home grown solution. While with
Serus one not only gets a solution
that is more cost effective but also
fully implemented within 6-9 weeks
as opposed to an internal project that
takes 6-9 months to start on,” Indu
explains.
Since the company delivers its
solution on cloud, it has found that
the pay-per use option (SaaS) is most
attractive to its clients, small,
medium and large organizations,
likewise. But the most challenging
aspect of being in the business Indu
feels is making organizations realize
the importance of operations man-
agement solution. But the recent re-
cession had brought a silver lining
for Serus. Since the downturn, most
organizations are striving to be lean
while increasing their profit margin.
Analysts too have recognized
siliconindia
|18|
October 2010
The Mind behind Serus
Often it is not the dreaming the dream but the execu-
tion of it where people fail. But Indu Navar has ac-
complished more in her three and a half decades than
most people perhaps do in a lifetime. An experienced
Silicon Valley technologist and entrepreneur, Indu, a
CEO of an IT company, an amateur pilot and mother of
10 year old wears many a hats.
Indu’s journey in the U.S. began when she came
to CSU, Chico in 1992 from India to pursue her Mas-
ter’s in Computer Science. Post her education she
started her career in IT with Healtheon (WebMD) and
was later a part of several renowned organizations in-
cluding Silicon Graphics, Cisco and NASA among others, before she co-
founded Serus.
Talking about how the unique name of the company, she laughs and ex-
plains, “The name derives from cirrus clouds, those feathery wisps that tor-
nadoes leave in their wake. Serus is actually in the business of upheaval
prevention, offering software that musters “the right information at the right
place at the right time.”
A dynamic person with always a smile on her face, Indu herself has
plenty to smile about. Started from her dining room in 2005 without the
help of any venture capital, Serus today is about to touch $100 million sales
by end of this year and counts billion-dollar companies such as Cisco and
Quantum Corporation as clients. Today, it is healthily backed by several ven-
ture capitalists, and Indu now hopes to take Serus public soon and thereby
realize her dream: “to build a company from zero to public offering.”
it has 50 employees in the U.S. and
Supply chain 13 in India.
executives today face Since, incorporation, Serus has
been on a momentum of high growth.
five major challenges The company has raised $19 million
— Cost Containment, in two rounds of venture funding
from OVP Venture Partners, Dia-
Supply Chain mondhead Ventures and Samsung In-
Visibility, Risk vestments.
Indu is very optimistic about the
Management, future, for she believes Serus is in a
increasing Customer unique position as the market leader
in her space. With most companies
Demands and giving up their manufacturing facili-
Globalization. ties and opting for outsourced manu-
facturers, Serus is confident on riding
Manufacturing Operations Manage- the growth wave. “The Serus culture
ment as a $4 billion market and this is one that sees no boundary, a cul-
is just in the semiconductor, hi-tech ture that challenges the way things
electrical manufacturer, and medical are done, we challenge and improve
devices sector alone. This opens up a on everything. We are a driven or-
vast opportunity for Serus. This is ganization that thrives on innovation
why the company plans to hire 20-25 without compromising Integrity and
more people by year end. At present team respect,” says Indu. si
Feature: By Christo Jacob
India’s global
delivery model is
at a competitive
advantage in the
software testing
space; there has
been a big shift
from just testing
to quality testing
siliconindia
|20| October 2010
Software Testing
‘Y
Riding
Era
on the
of
Transformation
our pain is my gain’ -
the software testing in-
dustry has evolved
over the years based
on this simple mantra.
According to the classic definition of Myers,
“Software testing is the process of executing
a program or system with the intent of find-
ing errors.“ Today, software bugs are costing
the US economy an estimated over $59.5 bil-
lion each year, with more than half of the
cost borne by end users and the remainder by
developers and vendors. The federal study
states that the improvements in testing could
reduce this cost by about a third, or by $22.5
billion, but it won’t eliminate all software er-
rors. Now, the Indian companies have real-
ized the potential opportunity of testing as a
business and it is no more only part of soft-
ware development, as it used to be earlier.
India, having the legacy and advantage
on the offshoring model, is quick in terms of
realizing that the problem is not about just
testing the problem, it is about providing
good quality software. This is evident from
the fact of all IT majors having testing cen-
ters of excellence and offering independent
testing service. According to a 2008 report,
the global market for software testing stands
at $13 billion, of which about $6 billion is
being outsourced to offshore locations in-
cluding India. “Of the $13 billion market,
India is acquiring around 70 percent of the
market that is $9.1 billion, and is expected to
grow by 40- 45 percent,” says Pradeep C,
CEO, Edista Testing Institute.
India’s global delivery model is at a com-
petitive advantage in the software testing
space too. The ever increasing competition
in the international market has forced organ-
izations to adapt to the recent quality
practices to patch up with the industry
requirements. Therefore, there has been
a big shift from just testing to quality
testing. During the initial days, testing
was largely a manual exercise; today
the testers wear the hat of the end users.
Every application or software is made
considering the end user experience,
emphasizing defect prevention. Around
four to five years ago, there was a grad-
ual shift from manual testing towards
automated testing, and today we are
talking about grey-box and white-box
testing.
Organizations have realized that
improving the final quality through var-
ious means and methods is of para-
mount importance. Earlier, they were
interested in functionalities of the prod-
ucts as their main stay and that is where
they counted on testing as a specialized
manner even reflecting the perform-
ance, reliability, and more. But doing
this will not help the organizations to
create stickiness among the customers
now and deepen the relationship, and
they are now talking about improving
the quality internally in terms of reduc-
ing the testing cycle and thus making
the outsourcing model more meaning-
ful. More and more customers are look-
ing at agile methodologies, which
results in faster time-to-market, being
more receptive to customer require-
ments, reduced cost of delivery, and im-
provement in quality.
Some organizations, especially the
SMBs, are looking at accelerators and
re-usable frameworks to further cut
down their costs. Another trend is the
ongoing inclination of customers to-
wards an outcome-based pricing model.
They are aligned with the demand for
cost-effectiveness, time-to-market, and
reliability. The belief is that two to three
years down the line around 50 percent
of the contracts would use a hybrid
model, where you have elements of
both traditional and outcome-based
models. Typically, the product develop-
ment lifecycles and go-to-market
(GTM) cycles are shrinking in the light
of ever changing business dynamics.
Everyone wants to put the product out
in the market as soon as possible, cap-
turing the customer share as soon as
possible to gain control on the chang-
ing business dynamics. Agility, it
seems, is paying dividends for such
short GTMs and providing a quick RoI.
Software as a Service (SaaS) and online
solutions are moving towards perpetual
beta platforms that can rapidly adapt to
the customers’ needs. This also holds
true for ERP implementation cycles,
which are shrinking by the day. What
used to take five years is now being re-
duced to one year implementation cycle
with rapid customizations. Many ISPs
(Independent Service Providers) are
pitching their testing processes to their
clients. But on the flipside, the corpo-
rates are internally feeling the pinch.
Today the testers wear the hat
of the end users. Every
application or software is
made considering the end
user experience, emphasizing
on defect prevention
Followed by global recession, the
pressure on margins for corporates (not
to mention survival) is high. They are
looking for operational efficiencies to
increase the margins to retain the oper-
ating profits while the top line sinks.
Corporates are increasingly betting on
digitizing and automating all processes
that can be automated, which shall con-
vert to cost savings by downsizing the
cost centers.
In the last three to four years, com-
panies have spent a lot of money on
customer acquisition. According to a
survey by TrialPay, a software
provider, software companies spend an
average of 39 percent of their revenues
on customer acquisition. This number
varies dramatically according to com-
pany size. Larger companies with rev-
enues greater than $5 million spend
only 17 percent, whereas small com-
panies with annual revenues of less
than $100,000 spend approximately 54
percent on customer acquisition.
Hence, many of them are innovating
on reducing the customer acquisition
costs and deepening the delivery ex-
perience. There are many organiza-
tions that are investing internally on
developing these processes and mak-
ing them much more robust and data-
centric so that it becomes much more
transparent and helps them to get real-
time updates on the project delivery.
Moreover, the testing companies have
realized that talent acquisition costs
have gone up. Hence, the ISPs are re-
ducing the cost on the mid level and
the senior level and they are trying to
have more people at the
ground level that can actually
perform most of the special-
ized activities in testing. This
has opened the doors to many
of the people who can actually
provide industry ready talent.
“Now companies are look-
ing for ready talents who can
be immediately put on a proj-
ect, so they don’t need to pay
them more. So, we have a
model in which that kind of outsourc-
ing is happening in domestic market
where the entire training and talent
supply function is being outsourced to
Indian market,” says Pradeep. Today,
ISPs are looking to include training as
a part of their business, wherein they
are able to get their students placed in
their own customer portfolio compa-
nies. “For India to be prepared to grab
the $9.1 billion pie of the outsourced
testing market, the major challenge is
to overcome the shortage of skilled re-
sources. According to estimates, there
is a shortage of 22,000 testers and po-
tentially there will be a shortfall of
40,000 more in the years to come,”
says Pradeep. si
siliconindia
|21|
October 2010
 Startups
VC Talk: By Jagannath Rao
The Author is Partner, Headstart Ventures LLP (HVP)
B
We Would
Fund
Like to
efore Surya, Kallol and I founded
Headstart Ventures LLP, we had
seen many queer things in the
startup land. But topping it all
was an invite to a theme park ride
by Subhash who was an old classmate of mine.
After a couple of rides and a roller coaster that
left me gasping for breath, I gave up and com-
pelled Subhash to get down to a serious dis-
cussion.
In his usual nonchalant manner he replied,
“What happened to you? Don’t you enjoy this
anymore? You know, I come to a new joint like
this every weekend just to break the lethargy at
work”.
Then he went on to tell his story. That he
had been working on an idea for a few months
over the weekend with friends, and that they
were all excited but did not want to take the
plunge yet. The glass office that fattened him
had, by now, also ad-
There are three things for an dicted him to comfort
idea to be a success: A pain levels of a couple of
homes, a chauffeur
point, a value point for the driven car, and still leav-
customer, and a way for the ing enough to take a
market to adopt it by doing year as well.
couple of vacations a
something that appeals
So I asked Subhash,
“What do you need in
order to take the
plunge?” He said his dilemma was that he was
comfortable paying his debts and couldn’t just
change his lifestyle. So I asked how much time
did he need to change. He said six months was
enough to tone down his comfort. Quizzingly,
I then asked him if he trusted me. Did he com-
pletely believe in his idea? How long did he
think the venture will live? He interrupted me
siliconindia
|22| October 2010
and said, “Of course I believe in it,” and then
went on to describe his idea.
The idea was a great one. But he was wise
enough to realize that the idea was but a tenth
of the road ahead. The big challenge was to
ride on the technology roller coaster – the hype
curve. Having crossed that, also onward to
cross the unknowns in the chasm; and having
straddled the chasm, then to create a sustain-
able biz model that wins customers in the mar-
ket; and then scales.
To goad him along, I asked him, “What
comes first? The market? Or the idea? Or the
technology? The glint in his eyes told me that
he had been through this many times. “Well,”
he pondered and hesitated a bit. “You know it’s
kind of a complex thing. Sometimes it’s un-
derstanding the market opportunity and doing
something cleverly. Sometimes it’s putting a
new idea in a new market. And sometimes it’s
applying a new technology to solve an old
problem. So it’s a complex combination and
one has got to really figure it out. But there are
three things it has got to solve for sure to be a
success: A pain point, a value point for the cus-
tomer, and a way for the market to adopt it by
doing something that appeals. So it is innova-
tion everywhere around.”
Seeing this coming from a glass office per-
son, I was truly amazed and asked him how he
learnt all this? He said he had invested in three
startups, which had all failed. In the first ven-
ture, the idea was great and he thought it would
just be a winner pants down. He was shocked
when the market did not adopt the idea despite
the unquestionable benefits. In the second, he
insisted that winning in the market was impor-
tant and got a market expert to drive the ven-
ture. Again it failed after some time because it
did not have any “real” edge espe-
cially in technology. So in the third
venture that he had invested in, he
brought in a technologist who created
an unconceivable product. But again,
it failed because the timing and mar-
ket forces were not right. By this time
he had lost all his money and had to
get into a glass office. He realized
how the VCs who wanted to co-in-
vest had provided inputs to him and
politely delayed financing when he
did not pay attention to their caution.
It is the confidence tempered by experience
that forms the best foundation of a new startup
He was broke but still full of zeal
and passion to invest further. That’s
when his uncle asked him to ap-
proach an angel investor network.
And this time, he had a great idea that
solved a pain point, he had the tech-
nology that created value to the cus-
tomer, and he had a strategy to create
the market buzz and signup paying
customers. He sold his car and fi-
nanced the venture along with the
angel network. To his joy, the venture
was a huge success within a year and
he was very happy to exit the venture
as a very rich man. Rich in experience
as well. But it left his family gasping
for breath and so he was now in a lu-
crative job that kept him in the com-
fort of a glass office.
Ending his story he asked me, “I
am itching for the next ride. Do you
want to join me? How about the Drop
Zone. It’s the biggest one I have
seen.” I will tell you about my idea
after the ride.
I politely refused the offer and
asked him how much money he
wanted. “Oh, $250,000 to kickstart
things but don’t you want to hear
about the venture?” I said, “No.
Please come and collect the cheque at
my office tomorrow. And here is a
‘blue card’ I hand out to everybody
Jagannath Rao out there.”
You don’t seem to need it but
keep it if you want. I have more
cards like this that I will keep hand-
ing out as we work together. You
will need those for sure even if you
apply all the experience you have
learnt so far. Also make sure you
keep the same execution team.
While he looked at my blue card
I put my arms around him and said
“Great. I will give you six months
for all of you to work on weekends
and build this venture keeping your
day job. I want you to use my
money only after you quit. You will
need it to pay your bills and keep the
show running. As you realize, it’s a
long run.”
Subash was a bit surprised and
looked up saying, “I have never
seen an investor sign a cheque with-
out hearing about the venture. Are
you doing it because I am an old
friend?” I told him, “In our business
we tend to lose friends. They either
get disappointed because we did not
fund them or because we told them
how naïve they were to enter the
startup land. So long as your idea
falls within the realm of telecom, In-
ternet services, healthcare, media
and entertainment, education, and
energy, I will be able to discuss with
my partners and then fund you. But
remember, I want you to adapt the
experience you have gained and
keep your execution team,” leaving
him staring at me as I turned and
walked away.
Returning to our office, my part-
ners who were tired of meetings and
turning down venture proposals all af-
ternoon, asked me why I looked kind
of dizzy. I said I had lots of fun at the
theme park and had found a good ven-
ture to invest in while they were slug-
ging it out all afternoon! si
siliconindia
|23| October 2010
Technology: By Shubha Sridhar
The author is Regional Manager – Technical Services,
Torry Harris Business Solutions
SOFTWARE TESTING
S
The Old & The New
oftware testing has evolved
considerably over the last
decade from single dimen-
sional test approaches to
multi-dimensional ones.
Testing now encompasses broader as-
pects such as test management through
‘push button test environment creation
on the Cloud’ to dedicated tool eval-
uations for each kind of testing.
There is general consensus world-
wide though, on the need for flexi-
bility and creativity in testing and
the need to treat testing as more than
just another ‘phase’ performed to-
wards the end of the project.
Traditional software testing that
focused on code-level testing has
evolved with Distributed and Web
Service architectures. Security takes
on more importance as there are
now multiple integrated systems
and multiple interfaces, internal and
external. In this context, I would
like to delve more into the details of
testing Service-oriented architecture
(SOA) and SOA based solutions, a sub-
ject close to my heart!
For Web Service architectures and
The V-Model:
SOA, the V-Model is typically a suit-
able test methodology that enforces
testing discipline throughout the proj-
ect lifecycle. The project starts with
defining the Business User Require-
ments. The V-Model would recom-
mend that the Business Acceptance Test
Criteria for these defined requirements
siliconindia
|26| October 2010
are defined and agreed before moving
to the start of the technical design
phase. Before moving to the next
phase/level of technical design, the
model recommends test criteria defined
for that level of technical requirements,
and so on. The V-Model is simply en-
couraging the project team to continu-
ally determine how they would
successfully test the project deliver-
ables.
The V-Model is a suitable test
methodology to deliver SOA projects
for the following reasons:
 It encourages a top-down approach
with respect to defining the busi-
ness process requirements, high-
level functional technical design,
security and more.
 It then encourages a bottom-up test
approach – test individual functions
within a service, test an individual
service then test a composite set of
services through to testing an inte-
grated process and finally testing a
complete business system. SOA is
‘loosely’ coupled services and that
is why a bottom up test approach is
recommended.
 The levels reflect different view-
points of testing on different levels
of detail.
 The V-Model encourages testing
throughout the entire Software De-
velopment Life Cycle.
Some of the new challenges in testing
Challenges:
SOA solutions as opposed to the tra-
ditional applications, typically, are:
 Services that do not have a user in-
terface
 Data driven business logic within
services
 External services to the organiza-
tion
 The quality of ‘service’ software
will be vital to promote reuse and
facilitate business agility. Services
that have known bugs and quality
issues will not be reused by the de-
velopment teams. A significant in-
crease in testing activities and test
assets (functional, performance and
security regression suites that in-
clude sophisticated harnesses and
stubs) will be required at a service
(program) level
 Predicting the future usage of serv-
ices to assist with performance,
load, stress, scalability
 As your SOA evolves, security test-
ing will have a higher priority and
profile within your organization’s
test strategy
In SOA, Services are based on het-
erogeneous technologies. No longer can
we expect to test an application that was
developed by a unified group, as a single
project, sitting on a single application
server and delivering through a stan-
dardized browser interface. The ability
to string together multiple types of com-
ponents to form a business process re-
quires unconstrained thinking from an
architect’s perspective, and test planning
and scheduling complexities from a
tester’s perspective.
In SOA, application logic is in the
middle-tier, operating within numerous
technologies, residing outside the de-
partment, or even outside the company.
We know that to test SOA, you need to
go far beyond merely testing a user in-
terface or browser screen. Web Services
(WSDL/SOAP) will be an important
component for many SOAs, but if
you’re only testing Web Services, you
are not likely to test the entire technol-
ogy stack that makes up the application.
What are the transactions happening at
the messaging layer? Is the right entry
being reflected in the database? In fact,
many perfectly valid SOA applications
will house business logic entirely outside
of the Web Services.
To address the above challenges, or-
ganizations need to review and enhance
their current test methodology. Many
Test Tool vendors have now recognized
the new SOA test challenges and have
developed a new breed of tools to help
organizations to plan, manage and auto-
mate SOA functional, performance and
security testing.
How do you test SOA architecture? You
Testing SOA solutions:
don’t. Instead, you learn how to break
down the architecture to its component
parts, working from the most primitive
to the most sophisticated, testing each
component, then the integration of the
holistic architecture. In other words, you
have to divide the architecture into do-
mains, such as services, security, and
governance and test each domain sepa-
rately using the recommended approach
and tools. SOA is loosely coupled with
complex interdependencies and a SOA
testing approach must follow the same
pattern.
You can broadly categorize SOA
testing into the following phases:
 Governance Testing
 Service-component-level testing
 Service-level testing
 Integration-level testing
 Process/Orchestration-level testing
 System-level testing
 Security Testing
As discussed earlier, tools are key in
Test Tools:
every phase of testing. SOA requires a
comprehensive test tool strategy. Some
of the commercial and open source tools
available in the market that could be ex-
plored for SOA testing initiatives would
be:
Commercial:
 Green Hat GH Tester
 Mercury suite of products
 Parasoft SOAtest
 AdventNet QEngine
 Borland SilkPerformer SOA edition
 iTKO’s LISA product suite
Open Source / Freeware:
 SOAP UI
 PushToTest TESTMAKER
 AutoStub (an internal tool devel-
oped by Torrry Harris, belonging to
the SOAizer™ stack)
As conclusion, a few key recommenda-
Conclusion:
tions for testing SOA initiatives would
be:
 Design your SOA project test ap-
proach alongside the definition of
business requirements and highlevel
technical design. Ensure the test
teams are involved right from the
start.
 Static test techniques such as for-
mal inspections are a must to ensure
the business requirements and tech-
nical designs are defined to stan-
dards and are complete. Strong
governance and discipline are es-
sential to successfully delivering
SOA.
 SOA is driven by business and not
technology. The test team will have
to ensure the key business stake-
holders and users are actively in-
volved throughout the project life
cycle and not just at the start and the
end.
 The Test team must be aligned to
business domains not technologies.
This will enable a successful im-
plementation of a Risk Based ap-
proach to testing. The test team
must also be technical and be able
to ‘white box’ test the entire SOA
platform.
 Security assessment and testing
must take place throughout the en-
tire project life cycle.
 Many organizations will need to
perform a ‘leap of faith’. The ma-
jority of testing activities now need
to be performed during the business
requirements analysis, design and
service build phases. To achieve de-
livery agility and true service reuse,
each individual service must be de-
livered to the Integration and UAT
test phases with well-defined func-
tional test coverage and guarantees
on performance, scalability and se-
curity. Simply put, services must
come with a Quality statement!
 Test Tools are now a must. Organi-
zations must invest appropriately in
a test tool strategy.
You should not be surprised that
many of the recommendations outlined
in this paper are not new. Many of them
are already defined as best practices.
SOA demands strong governance, well-
defined standards, processes and disci-
plines. If Quality is at the heart of your
SOA, then the promises of SOA will be
delivered. si
siliconindia
|27| October 2010
Technology: By Ramesh Krish
The author is Chief Technology Officer, Indium Software India
Test Automation Framework
Challenges in the Ever Changing
Technology Scenario
Test automation has matured over a pe-
The Background
riod of time; from the crude form of au-
tomated tests that were set up just to run
specific or stop gap runs, we today have
much refined and well defined automa-
tion tests. According to a study, in the
year 2004 the number of automated
tests that were conducted globally as
against manual tests were a mere 5 per-
cent. However, by 2006 this increased
to 20 percent. Going by this rate, we
may be around 50 percent today. Ac-
cording to a study conducted by the US
NIST, software producers lose 21.2 bil-
lion dollars annually because of inade-
quate testing. Based on market
estimates, software companies world-
wide invested 931 million dollars in au-
tomated software testing tools in 1999,
with an estimate of at least 2.6 billion
dollars in 2004. This certainly tells us
one thing: Customers are seeing the real
benefits of test automation. The last 5-6
years has seen a considerable run in
commercial testing tools and we now
are seeing the trend of customers re-
questing for ‘opensource’ tools, thanks
to changing economic situations.
One of the key factors in choosing a
test automation tool is the technology
siliconindia
|28| October 2010
that is used to build the application. Not
all tools support all technologies and
that throws up the challenge of maxi-
mizing test automation returns with lim-
ited capabilities of tools. For example,
an application developed in .NET or
Java may require test automation tools
to support such technology. Some of the
tools come with specific plugins to ad-
dress such challenges. So, choosing the
right tool goes a long way in getting the
expected RoI.
Spending enough time on choosing the right
framework and designing it is the key to test
automation success; and a good and robust
framework should be quite flexible
One would certainly run out of business
Technology, a Show-Stopper?
if technology becomes a show-stopper.
While that could be a very generic state-
ment specific to test automation, tech-
nology has been one of the biggest
challenges. With every new patch or re-
lease of an OS, browser, languages, or
for that matter even test automation
tools, the challenges to maintain au-
tomation scripts are undeniably com-
pounded. By the time you start a test au-
tomation project and complete it, you
may find changes in the environment it
is set to work. The script that you have
developed, while the customer agreed
for a specific version, will not be of any
use to him if the customer is going to
upgrade their systems to the new ver-
sion of the browser, for instance. Here
is when a robust framework and good
coding practice facilitate a smooth tran-
sition.
Develop framework that is inde-
pendent of test automation tools. Since
every tool has some limitation, it is best
to use a combination of tools to take the
maximum returns out of test automation
investment. A combination of commer-
cial and opensource tools is a good mix.
Having a framework that best supports
such a mix will give the best advantage
over other frameworks.

CRs or change requests have become the
Never Ending CRs
norm of the day. Today, CRs not neces-
sarily include change in functionality and
features due to changing business re-
quirements but also the impact the appli-
cation goes through because of the
technological changes. Let us consider a
situation like this: an application that is
stable has about 1,250 automated test
scripts that are run every other day and
being used by 100s of customers
worldwide. Due to business reasons
the company decides to change the
technology or architecture of the
application. Now this is going
to have an impact on the au-
tomation scripts as well. Ei-
ther the scripts will have to
be discarded completely, which
is money into the drain, or evaluate
the possibility to modify the scripts
to suit the new architecture or tech-
nology. In case the latter being a pos-
sibility, an evaluation of time and effort
required for such modification and asso-
ciated costs need to be considered. Since
users are realizing the benefits of au-
tomation, this aspect should not be
missed when someone is considering
changes to the application. Thus, it is im-
portant to integrate test automation in the
purview of CRs, i.e., whenever a CR is
raised, it is important to evaluate its im-
pact on the automation scripts. A robust
test automation framework will make
such impacts minimal.
Test automation framework is a set of
Build Framework that Works
rules, procedures, and tools that drive au-
tomated testing. One of the main advan-
tages of using a framework is the low
cost of maintenance. For any changes to
the application, only the concerned test
case(s) need to be updated while the rest
of the script remains the same.
Some of the most common frame-
works are data driven, keyword driven,
modular, and hybrid. There are again
custom built frameworks that fit to spe-
cific needs of the application. Spending
siliconindia
|30| October 2010
enough time on choosing the right frame-
work and designing it is the key to test
automation success. A good and robust
framework should consider as many as-
sumptions as possible. This will eventu-
Considering the devel-
opment of framework
as a typical develop-
ment project goes a
long way in getting the
required RoI
ally make the framework quite flexible.
While it will be difficult to prove due to
lack of data but the general belief is that
most of the test automation projects fail
in the long run as the framework is not
flexible enough to adapt to the changes
that the application or the environment
has undergone.
Let us take an example to explain
the above situation. Consider a Web
application that is developed in .NET
technology compatible to WinXP,
Vista, and Win7 and browsers such as
IE and Firefox. A version 5.0 of a test
automation tool is used to automate a
set of sanity test cases. A test au-
tomation framework is developed to
ensure that as the application under-
goes changes, there are re-usable
functions that are developed so that
with less effort you can address those
changes. Most of the frameworks
today address this basic need. How-
ever, consider a situation where a
new version of OS, browser, and
the test automation tool need to
be addressed in the framework
itself. It is not an easy situa-
tion or assumption to imag-
ine or incorporate within a
framework.

The next generation frame-
works should address the best
of the following:
Coverage
 Business Process
 Extended Environment
 Multi OS
 Multi Test Automation Tools
 Best of Reporting and Analysis
 Defect Analysis
 Metric
 Compliance such as HIPPA or
SOX
 Recovery Scenario
 Addressing Technology Chal-
lenges
Building a test automation framework
Conclusion
needs skills such as designing, analyt-
ical, and a lot of foresight. While
testers bring in a lot of value and in-
sight into developing the framework,
it is the designers and developers who
eventually build it. Considering the
development of framework as a typi-
cal development project goes a long
way in getting the required RoI. Build
the best software engineering practices
while developing a framework. Some
of the critical aspects, as the figure de-
picts, make the framework dependable
and robust in the long run. si
Technology: By Tushar Bhatnagar
The Author is Project Leader, Infinite Computer Solutions
A
NPD for
bout a year ago, I was
trying to find software
to automatically sync
my Windows Mobile
based Pocket PC to my
computer using Bluetooth when the
computer is in range. I did a lot of re-
search and found that no such soft-
ware was available in the market.
This surprised me because there
seemed to be many people, including
me, who would love to have this type
of software. It was then that I decided
to develop one for myself.
Pocket PCs and other handheld
devices either need to be connected
by wire or paired by Bluetooth to
synchronize the contacts, emails,
files, and so on. To connect either
way, one has to manually connect the
Pocket PC with the PC. The feature I
wanted would allow the Pocket PC,
when in Bluetooth range, to auto-
matically connect to the PC, syn-
chronize itself, disconnect after sync
and then go back to sleep in order to
save battery power.
Handheld
Devices
With desktop computing came millions of
concepts and ideas to incorporate into
desktop and Web applications. Now, all
those ideas and features can be ported to
handheld devices
Let us relate it to a typical new
product development cycle, which
outlines the process of bringing a
new product or service to the mar-
ket. The process involves the impe-
tus of change, the concept, market
research and analysis, product de-
sign and development, and launch-
ing the product into the market. Few
may realize that there is a rapidly
growing market for these small de-
vices and related products and serv-
ices. Microsoft’s Windows CE has
evolved into Windows Mobile v6.1.
Palm OS has evolved into Palm
Centro based smartphones and an
all-new breed of smartphones and
handheld devices have started flood-
ing the market including the latest
iPhone 3G. With all these platforms,
the Software Development Kit and
thousands of APIs and libraries to
develop diversified applications
come. Microsoft Visual Studio .Net
is my choice for Mobile and Em-
bedded development for Windows
mobile and Windows smartphone
based devices. Visual Studio and the
Windows Mobile SDK make it pos-
sible to create software for the Win-
dows Mobile platform in both native
code (Visual C++) and managed
code (Visual C#, Visual Basic .NET)
With the dawn of desktop com-
puting came millions of concepts
and fresh ideas to incorporate into
desktop and Web applications,
leveraging the power of the Internet.
Now, all those ideas and features
can be ported to handheld devices
leveraging upon the form factor,
portability, and ease of use. For ex-
ample, how cool would it be to have
an application on your favorite PDA
or Phone that could tell you the gas
prices at the gas stations around you
and if required, it can navigate you
to the pump using turn-by-turn
voice and visual guidance. How
about an application, which reminds
you to post that package sitting in
your car for weeks, when you are
near the post office? Different peo-
ple have different requirements as
well as features they wish for, but
one thing is for sure - this is an area
in which there is a wide scope to put
forth effort. si
siliconindia
|31|
October 2010
Technology: By Ganapathy Subramaniam
The author is CEO, Cosmic Circuits
worldwide semiconductor market will  Design is value add in fab-less
grow year after year. companies and policies have to
Policy Changes Needed to Encourage

Design is the key aspect in fab-less It is clear that the Indian government be drafted with this in mind since
Fab-less Companies in India

T
semiconductor companies and is the
biggest value add. As the services of
A Case for Policy Initiative for fabs, assembly, and test are available to
all, the only way to differentiate is in de-
needs to follow China, Korea, and Sin- current policies are structured to-
gapore and come up with policy initia- wards local manufacturing and
tives for fab-less companies in India. or testing, which will not be the
Most of our policies are structured to- case with fab-less companies

Indian Fabless Company sign. Without innovation in design, fab-

he worldwide semiconduc-
tor market is around $275
billion, and the India market
is around $8 billion. The
world market is expected to
grow in double digit CAGR for the next
several years, but sadly Indian chip com-
panies have negligible share in this.
Worldwide, semiconductor market,
which once used to be dominated by
IDM (integrated device manufacturers),
i.e. companies that had their captive
manufacturing units like Intel and Texas
Instruments ( fabrication plant) are now
losing some of their share to fab-less
semiconductor companies like Qual-
comm and Broadcom [companies, which
rely on external manufacturing plants
(fabs) like TSMC, Global Foundry, and
SMIC]. Most of the policies in India are
towards encouraging IT industry and
manufacturing industry, which are serv-
ice oriented and employ a large number
of people. This article outlines the policy
changes that need to be done to encour-
age fab-less semiconductor companies in
India, which also would result in intel-
lectual property creation and ownership,
both of which are must for a stronger
India.
The private semiconductor industry is
Semiconductor Industry in India
approximately 25 years old in India, with
Texas Instruments starting its office in
Bangalore in 1985. SCL (which belongs
to the government of India) also designed
and fabricated ICs in India. There are an
estimated 10,000+ people working in the
area of VLSI design in India. Many
multinationals create worldclass products
from India. Almost all the top US, Euro-
pean, and Japanese SC companies have
their subsidiaries in India. Apart from the
MNC’s there are semiconductor startups
like Redpine systems and Hellosoft,
which are headquartered in the US (some
in Europe) but with bulk of their engi-
neering in India. There is a handful of In-
dian semiconductor companies doing
products or intellectual property licens-
ing. Cosmic Circuits is one of them,
which is focused on intellectual property
licensing and has some analog ASICs in
production. There is a decent number of
Indian companies like KPIT Cummins,
Mindtree, Wipro, and HCL that are en-
gaged in semiconductor services.
Clearly, there is talent in India to cre-
ate a worldclass semiconductor com-
pany. When demand in local market
happens, it is believed that the local tal-
As the services of fabs,
assembly, and test are
available to all, the
only way to
differentiate is in
design
ent and also Indians with semiconductor
experience abroad will return to India
and create successful semiconductor
companies.
Opportunities for Semiconductor In-
The Indian semiconductor companies
dustry in India
would possibly take the same route taken
less companies will find it difficult to
survive. Summarizing,
wards the services and manufacturing
industries. It is important to create a
strong intellectual property base to cre-
where the products could be
manufactured and tested outside
India. SEZ is also not financially
a. Fab-less companies are taking up a ate a stronger India. The semiconductor advisable for fab-less startups.
by the semiconductor companies in Tai-
major segment of semiconductor mar- companies are important, as they can  Government tenders should in-
wan or Korea when they started, i.e.
ket. play a highly significant role in this. clude a certain percentage of
when significantly supported by local
b. Majority of startups today are fab-
It is important to create a strong intellectual
market or local buying. Semiconductor
less.
companies in Taiwan were benefitted by
property base to create a stronger India. The
c. Fab-less companies work with exter-
the presence of ODMs (original design
nal fabs, assembly, and test houses for
semiconductor companies are important, as
manufacturers) initially. Semiconductor
their products.
companies in Korea are largely benefit-
they can play a highly significant role in this
d. Since fab and assembly is common
ted by OEMS (original equipment man-
to all, the biggest differentiation they
ufacturers), like Samsung and LG.
can make is in design.
ODMS and OEMs in India are largely
Fabless companies are usually of
multinationals where a decision on using
medium size of, say, 150 to 200 people STPI was formed with the intention mandatory local intellectual
a particular IC is made in their respective

to create $100 million revenue. A signif- of supporting IT companies. The property content. This will en-
headquarters. We expect this trend to
icant part of this strength is in design, SEZ are ideal for manufacturing courage the equipment manufac-
change and some of the decision making
sales, and marketing since most of the plants or large IT Companies. Semi- turers to use the ICs designed by
will happen in India, fuelling the growth
manufacturing is outsourced. conductor companies were also in- Indian fab-less companies. Gov-
of semiconductor companies.
cluded under STPI since majority of ernment labs should actively en-
Indian fab-less companies have got
the companies do services or li- courage the local companies for
opportunities in the following areas:
censing work and STPI is not ex- their needs in Semiconductors.
Role of Governments to Boost Semi-
The Chinese government has been play- pected to extend beyond March  Set up a Reliability and Failure
conductor Fab-less Companies
a. Energy meters (Owned mostly by In-
ing an active role in creating fab-less de- 2011. mode analysis lab to assist the
dian OEMs)
b. Inverters
sign companies in China.
An article published by EETIMES
Fab-less companies sell prod-
ucts, and India has a negligibly
fab-less companies as part of
government labs or institutes.
c. Identification (RFID)
d. Lighting
in May 2010 states that China’s planners small marketshare in worldwide Set up a seed fund to encourage
e. Gadgets related to Education
are cranking up their initiative to seed as
many as 30 fab-less semiconductor start-
TAM and also not even able to full-
fill a fraction of her own demand.
entrepreneurs in the fab-less semicon-
ductor space and also actively invest
f. Gadgets related to Security
g. Automotive (specifically two wheel-
ups that could grow to $200 million or The fab-less companies have to be in startups to create semiconductors
ers) Defense and aerospace, etc.
more in annual revenues.
China is also actively inviting Indian
encouraged with a new policy. The
fab-less startups are sized at about
for government projects such as low
end laptops, epassport, smartcards, etc.
companies like Cosmic Circuits to set up 150 to 200 people, making it diffi-
their unit in Suzhou technology park, cult to move into a SEZ, and they
Fab-less companies are taking a big por-
Fab-less Semiconductor Industry
etc. also have a limitation for fab-less The challenges of fab-less companies
Summary
tion of the worldwide Semiconductor
He Korean government is also companies where the products will are unique and are not covered by the
market and even IDMs are becoming
known to seed fab-less semiconductor be manufactured and tested outside SEZ and STPI. Also, India is lagging
fab-lite (relying on external fabs like
companies and also to give attractive India. behind in Semiconductors and Indian
TSMC for some of their business). Most
grants. Broad policy changes that irequired companies have negligible share in
of the large Japanese companies, which

The economic development board of for fab-less companies are: the worldwide market. A new policy
used to have their own technology till
Singapore also gives attractive support  Tax exemption and R&D Grants needs to be drafted to encourage fab-
40nm, will align either with IBM or
for companies to start operations in Sin- to encourage the fab-less semi- less companies from India that also
TSMC for 28nm. We expect this trend to
gapore, specifically if you are engaged conductor companies for next 10 increase the intellectual property
continue and the fab-less segment in
in intellectual property creation. years. content. si

siliconindia
|32| October 2010 siliconindia
|33| October 2010
Management: By Prashad Deshpande
The Author is Director, Empowered Learning Systems
The image of the Titanic sinking, im-
How We Think Matters
mortalized in a movie is a defining visual
of how the unimaginable can become
possible and how ‘rock solid’ assump-
tions are mistaken for facts. Those clos-
est to the Titanic were the ones most
convinced of her invincibility.
able.” - Philip Franklin, Vice-President
“We believe that the boat is unsink-
of White Star Line, 8-00 a.m., April 15,
1912.
“I cannot imagine any condition
which would cause the ship to founder. I
cannot conceive of any vital disaster
building has gone beyond that.” - Cap-
happening to this vessel. Modern ship-
tain Edward Smith.
We all, at some point of time, fall a
victim to the Titanic mindset, “Since I am
so sure, I can’t be wrong,” and some of
us most of the times. This is because the
way we think influences the way we be-
have and we all ‘see’ the world through
the prism of our own attitudes shaped by
the forces of nature and nurture. The first
step to make a shift in our mindset is to
understand how we think and our domi-
nant preferences.
In the 16th century, when Rene Descartes
Whole Brain Thinking Background
siliconindia
|34| October 2010
The
Power
of Whole Brain Thinking
declared “I think, therefore I am” he put
a spotlight on the importance of think-
ing. Four hundred years later, Ned Her-
rmann took this question further when he
experienced an epiphany after reading an
article by Henry Mintzberg in the HBR.
The article asked a powerful question
that haunted him - “How come managers
can be so smart and yet dull at the same
time?”
Ned Herrmann was a polymath, a
singer (he sang at Carnegie Hall), a
sculptor, a physicist by training from
Carnegie Mellon, and he was also the
head of Management Development at
GE, at that time.
This question intrigued him in the
sense it was a question vital to help him
understand himself better.
GE supported Ned’s experiments
and applications and the pursuit of the
‘aha’ of the Mintzberg Moment during
the late ’70s, and it was these activities
that led to the development of the whole
brain concept and the Herrmann Brain
Dominant Instrument HBDI®.
Ned Herrmann combined Sperry’s work
The Whole Brain Thinking Concept
and MacLean’s research (both renowned
Nobel Prize winning scientists) to create
his Whole Brain Model, which empha-
sizes the fact that there are really four
parts of the brain where dominances
exist: Cerebral left, Limbic Left, Limbic
Right, and Cerebral Right. These four
styles or ‘mindsets’ are known as quad-
rants A, B, C, and D .
This is of course a metaphorical
mode that describes how each of us has
a preferred way and mode of thinking
that affects the way we receive and
process information. The awareness of
one’s own thinking style and that of oth-
ers, combined with the ability to act out-
side of one’s preferred thinking style is
known as Whole Brain Thinking
For a good metaphor to understand
Tuning in
how the Whole Brain Thinking model
works, consider for a moment that our
brain is a radio and that we have our
favorite stations that we are ‘tuned to ’
and listen to more often. These fa-
vorite stations are our dominant think-
ing preferences - we all have at least
one dominant preference.
The model helps us understand
which ‘stations’ we have a preference for
and which we ‘avoid’, and there is noth-
ing right or wrong if some of us prefer
tuning into different stations. It also tells
us that each of us has an access to each
station. If we don’t listen to a station
often, it may require some work for us to
tune in. The faster we are able to tune
into the right station given the situation,
the more effective we will be. We don’t
need to stay tuned in to stations we do
not prefer but tune in only when re-
quired.* (for more please read ‘The Cre-
ative Brain’ by Ned Herrmann.)
Whole Brain Thinking and the
The Herrmann Brain Dominance Instru-
HBDI®
ment (HBDI®) is the instrument that ac-
curately identifies one’s thinking
preferences. This instrument is very easy
to administer given that it is online ,takes
only 20 minutes to fill in and provides an
accurate, visual , validated profile of how
one thinks and more importantly, how
one thinks under pressure.
Over 2 million people world-wide
have been administered the profile and
in India, we have administered the pro-
file to over 1,200 managers from 32
companies.
Real life profiles (masked) are given
below.
CEO
Examples of HBDI profiles reflect-
ing the dominance of each quadrant.
The white lines indicate how the indi-
vidual thinks under stress conditions.
The inner concentric circle indicates
avoidance in that quadrant, the circle
next to that indicates secondary think-
ing preferences and the last two con-
centric circles indicate primary thinking
preferences in that quadrant.
People Behind Profiles – the
The funny part of our consulting work is
‘Adamant’ CEO
helping managers understand the impli-
cations of their profiles. Every profile is
a ‘story’ and in interpreting the story,
people gain insights that help them
make significant changes in the way
they approach issues and change their
behavior toward the team, colleagues,
clients, and at home.
Please refer to the profiles men-
tioned earlier. The CEO of a large man-
ufacturing company was a ‘high blue’ -
a very analytical, fact based, and precise
person. He was impatient with people
who took too long to get to the point. He
was also very sure of his approach, had
a high focus on task and numbers, and
saw no need to change. After all, he was
very successful having steered the com-
pany to new heights, the quintessential
‘Captain of the Titanic”. Under pres-
sure, he became even more analytical
and as his people would say privately he
was the ‘iceman’ apparently bereft of
emotion. Not completely true of course,
he was emotional, but he prided himself
on his ability to keep his feelings under
check.
VICE- PRESIDENT SERVICE
He ‘saw’ the world very differently
from his deputy – the Vice President of
Service who was more people focused,
believed in relationships, and who was
very approachable. He respected the
abilities of his deputy, however, but
was worried that he was too soft on
people. On their one-on-one’s, he re-
peatedly suggested to his deputy that
he should be tougher and develop the
ability to take ‘hard’ decisions.
Their weekly meetings were be-
coming increasingly strained and un-
productive and when both of them
completed their HBDI profiles, it
was as if the lights went on - a ‘aha’
moment.
They both saw how differently
they ‘viewed’ the world and this ac-
ceptance of differences made the CEO
open to change. The CEO requested
his deputy to address the monthly staff
meetings, which earlier, the CEO used
to do. The outcome of this ‘small’
change was that while it was very dif-
ficult for the CEO in the initial meet-
ings to control his impatience,- his
deputy took 15 minutes to ‘warm up’ -
he found that when he spoke later, the
team was much more receptive to his
messages. For the deputy, he began to
understand the importance of being
succinct and precise.
The power of the Whole Brain Think-
Harnessing Potential
ing model is the ability to help people
and teams change their mindsets. The
HBDI is a cognitive tool, it is visual, it
does not pigeonhole you in a box nor
label you as a certain type, and there
lies its almost universal acceptance.
A greater realization for people is
that there are four equally valid and
relevant ways of thinking and the
goal is really to stretch oneself into
quadrants where one has an avoid-
ance and become ‘situationally
whole’ when required.
We believe that the larger goal for
individuals, teams, and organizations
is to move three levels to harness the
full potential of their people and teams:
From the first level of just ‘tolerating’
differences to the next level of ‘accept-
ing’ differences to third level of ‘ hon-
ouring’ differences.
This journey can be extremely re-
warding in terms of personal growth as
well as for organizations in terms of
unleashing the power of true collabo-
rative working. si
siliconindia
|35|
October 2010
Technology: By Bhaskar Bakthavatsalu
The author is Regional Director – India & SAARC,
Check Point Software Technologies
DLP Prevention is Better
D
than a Cure
ata loss occurs every day through corporate email. In fact,
given the sheer number of emails an organization sends
every day, data loss incidents via email are bound to happen
easily and frequently. Common email mistakes include auto-
filling the wrong email address, attaching a different file than
the one intended, or sending out sensitive data that really shouldn’t be
emailed.
Anyone within an organization could potentially cause a data breach,
at any time and in a matter of seconds. What’s even more worrying is
that employees may not actually realize what they’ve done until after
the email has been sent. Unfortunately, it sometimes only takes
one such incident to damage a businesses’ reputation and result
in loss of customers.
Involving individual
employees in the corporate
security process is the only
viable approach to avoid
data loss incidents
A CSO from a large organization recently confessed to
Protecting People against Their Mistakes
me that a substantial part of his time is spent
trying to protect users from their own mis-
takes. This was no surprise to me. When it
comes to securing a key business tool
such as email, companies should think
about educating employees even before
deploying any technological net.
siliconindia
|36| October 2010
Our research found that about 90 per-
cent of data loss incidents are uninten-
tional errors, with no malicious intent.
Most of the time, such incidents happen
quite innocuously and result from very
simple actions, such as an employee
sending a file to their personal Web mail
account, so they can work on the docu-
ment from home. Although the employee
has good intentions, such practice is often
against corporate policy and could turn
into a data breach for the company. The
majority of data loss is caused by em-
ployees’ simple mistakes, with no mali-
cious intent, so why not give them more
responsibility to help avoid future leaks?
So, how can businesses efficiently
prevent data incidents from happening?
Involving individual employees in the
corporate security process is the only vi-
able approach to avoid data loss inci-
dents. It is also the only way to turn a
DLP solution into a truly preventative
tool - as opposed to a reactive tool. For
businesses, proactively educating users
about the potential security issues that
can arise from seemingly innocuous ac-
tions, like sending an email and reinforc-
ing their overall DLP awareness, will
provide the first and ultimate shield
against data breaches.
Let’s take a closer look at this user-
focused approach to DLP and how it
could work.
First of all, in order to increase the user
Taking Control
awareness, an effective DLP solution will
alert the user before they can send a sus-
picious email that may cause a loss inci-
dent.
Let’s take the scenario of an em-
ployee who has composed an email, ad-
dressed it, and clicked on the ‘send’
button. A useful DLP solution should
analyse the body of the email with its at-
tachments compared with a set of pre-de-
fined characteristics to identify
potentially sensitive data. This could in-
clude, for example, certain key words in
the email body text such as ‘financial’,
‘report’, ‘specifications’, ‘confidential’,
and so on. In addition, file types such as
spreadsheets or presentations with finan-
cial data, confidential records, or even
some strategic material may need to be
carefully scrutinized.
Technology combined with educating
users about the impact of their actions is
the best method to prevent data loss in
the corporate environment, and to
minimize the security risks
Once the DLP solution detects a po-
tential breach based on this analysis, it
will override the ‘send’ instruction and
present the user with a pop-up alert to in-
form them of the potential data loss and
ask how they wish to proceed. The user
will have to decide whether they: a)
want to send the email and its attach-
ment(s) as it is; or b) realise that they
have made a mistake and correct the
body text or remove the suspicious at-
tachment(s). There should also be the
option for the user to leave a brief ex-
planation as to why they overrode the
DLP solution’s alert.
But what happens if, after seeing the
Decision Points
pop-up alert, the employee decides to
send the email anyway, resulting in data
loss? The DLP solution keeps records of
all of the user’s actions, of the fact that
he or she was alerted, as well as the jus-
tifications they provided, giving an audit
trail for subsequent analysis and review.
This establishes a clear chain of events
when reviewing the data-loss incident,
which will come in very handy for in-
ternal review and external compliance
purposes.
The system aims to increase the
users’ responsibility, to encourage them
to review what they plan to send, and
help them correct any digressions from
the company’s security policy before a
data loss incident occurs.
To summarize, the benefits of this DLP
Preventing Loss, Gaining Benefits
system fall into two main areas:
First, and most importantly, compa-
nies can significantly reduce the num-
ber of data loss incidents upon
deployment. As employees experience
the DLP solution in action, they will
learn more about data loss, how it typi-
cally occurs and how to avoid it. This
encourages adherence to company se-
curity policies. Over time, pop-up alerts
to users will most likely decrease as
users become more conscious and in-
creasingly aware of the types of activ-
ity that triggers an alert.
Second, engaging the users in the
data-loss prevention process will di-
rectly benefit the organization, by re-
ducing the burden of day-to-day
security management from IT staff. The
majority of decisions about whether
content can be sent or not, is taken by
users directly - a sharp contrast to pre-
vious-generation DLP solutions that re-
quire IT staff to check every email
flagged as a potential risk. Eventually,
empowering the user enables IT teams
to concentrate on more strategic tasks,
instead of getting bogged down in email
approvals.
When it comes to preventing data
loss in the corporate environment, tech-
nology alone is not the answer, but it
can be used as a safety net. Technology,
when combined with educating users to
become more aware of the impact of
their actions, is the best method for min-
imizing the overall security risks. After
all, the old adage had it right: Preven-
tion truly is better than a cure. si
siliconindia
|37| October 2010
 Technology: By Mileend Gadkari
Delivering Broadband to
The Author is Director of Business Development, Sigma Designs
A
Global MDUs
An evaluation of the multiple options available to MSOs to
penetrate one of the world’s fastest growing market segments
bout a year ago, Peleg Aker
clung to a flimsy bamboo
ladder that was teetering
three stories above the
bustling streets of New
Delhi, India. Dizzy yet determined, Aker
ascended to the roof of an apartment build-
ing, where he found a service provider’s
termination box in a nest of coaxial cables.
Aker’s mission: to bring broadband to
every apartment within the multi dwelling
unit (MDU). As the picture demonstrates,
this is a much more difficult job than it first
appears. What’s even more confusing is
that this jumble of cables is the number of
options available to the MSOs attempting
to service the global MDU market. (See
Figure 1.)
The one thing each of these options
have in common is the move to digitiza-
tion. Today, everything is becoming digi-
tal. Voice, video, music, books - the entire
entertainment and informational experi-
ence is moving from analog-based to digi-
tal-based. Whole economies are evolving
as a result of this shift and countries around
the globe are striving to keep up with this
dramatic change. Citizens need access to
the digital world. Governments have rec-
ognized this need and are providing bil-
lions of dollars in subsidies for creating
broadband infrastructure to stimulate their
local economies and create new, higher-
salaried jobs. They recognize that a coun-
try whose citizens are connected to the
Internet are connected to the global econ-
omy and tend to have better, more pros-
perous lives.
Connecting these citizens creates a
tremendous opportunity for service
providers. Already, telcos have been riding
siliconindia
|38| October 2010
this digitization wave. Companies such as
AT&T, Verizon, France Telecom, and oth-
ers have benefited from the digitization of
entertainment. Over the last few years,
telecommunications service providers have
generated substantial increases in Average
Revenues Per Subscriber or User (ARPU)
by adding IPTV, VoIP services, VoD, and
broadband access. These Quadruple Play
services have reduced customer churn as
well.
However, not every service provider has
MSOs Face Challenges with MDUs
fully benefited from the global digitaliza-
tion trend. Around the world, many Multi-
ple Systems Operators (MSOs) - traditional
cable companies - have not participated in
this digital revolution to the extent they
could. They would like to, but there are
several challenges that are holding them
back.
First, a large segment of this broadband
market consists of Multi Dwelling Units,
or MDUs (row-houses, apartment build-
ings, condominiums, and townhouses). An
estimated one third of the world’s popula-
tion lives in them. The MDU environment
represents a different infrastructure than
stand-alone homes. Often, these MDU en-
vironments have users share the same coax
or phone infrastructure, which makes de-
livering broadband to these environments
more challenging. (See Figure 2.)
Second, most MSOs don’t have bidi-
rectional data networks. Traditionally, they
have a unidirectional analog or digital
broadcast TV network with one-way am-
plifiers, splitters, and related passive com-
ponents. Moreover, this infrastructure is
often old and degraded. As a result, it has
been historically very expensive for an
MSO to upgrade its one-way network to
support two-way data communications
standards such as DOCSIS that run at high
frequencies. That is why DOCSIS is con-
fined to only the most affluent markets.
(See Figure 3.)
Rolling out broadband, VoIP, VoD, and
other digital services by MSOs can, indeed,
be very expensive. In many markets, the
ARPU for an MSO is quite low and the
ARPU for data services is also low in com-
parison to North America or Western Eu-
rope. These MSOs are looking for
affordable solutions that don’t require huge
upfront capital investments.
Finally, in single-family dwellings, the
broadband access bandwidth is reserved
exclusively for each home. Yet, in an MDU
environment, the bandwidth needs to be
shared among a larger number of users. As
a result, MSOs targeting MDU customers
need a technology that can support many
users over a shared, outdated infrastructure.
Service Providers Have Several Broad-
It is possible for service providers to de-
band Options
liver broadband and Triple Play services to
MDU customers - and to increase ARPU.
There are several ways to go: DSL, DOC-
SIS, and Ethernet over Coax (EoC).
One option is to deploy DSL, an estab-
lished access technology with a large in-
stalled base. However, DSL is expensive
for MDUs because it is a point-to-point
technology requiring a dedicated DSL chip
on each end of every telephone line. This
makes the DSLAM (the DSL central
switch) expensive. Moreover, DSL runs
over telephone wires. The MSO does not
have access to these wires and is there-
fore excluded from providing Internet
connectivity using phone lines.
Another option is to deploy DOC-
SIS, which is another well-known tech-
nology used for years to deliver
broadband over coax wiring. Yet, DOC-
SIS also has a series of challenges for
MSOs. First, DOCSIS is very expen-
sive. A DOCSIS deployment requires
the purchase of a cable modem termina-
tion system or CMTS (a primary system
and a backup system). Each CMTS can
support a large number of users, but can
cost hundreds of thousands of dollars
apiece to deploy. Furthermore, whether
an MSO supports one single customer or
100 customers, it has to spend all the
money upfront for the CMTS. Also, as
stated above, DOCSIS often requires a
complete overhaul of the entire outdoor
cable plant to improve its sensitivity to
line quality and to support the high fre-
quencies required by DOCSIS.
A third option, Ethernet over Coax
(EoC) is another potential alternative that
is proving to be a highly reliable and cost-
effective one. Here’s how it works:
The service provider runs IP from its
head-end over fiber to an optical node
unit (ONU) at the curb, the basement, a
central point in the building, or on the
roof. At the ONU, the traffic is routed to
a master EoC unit. The master is con-
nected to the existing coax wiring inside
the building (typically in a tree or star
topology). IP traffic is streamed across the
coax to each apartment or residence
where an end point is placed to bridge
back to Ethernet. (See Figure 4.)
Because EoC solutions use existing
coax, there are several key benefits. One
is cost savings. Using the already installed
coax infrastructure reduces the need to in-
stall new wiring. A second benefit is
longer distances. CAT5 has a maximum
range of 200 meters. Distances longer
than 200 meters require the addition of a
router. With EoC solutions such as
HomePNA, more than 1 kilometer of dis-
tance can be reached without the need for
an intermediary network device. Lastly,
Figure 1. Networking solutions for multi dwelling Figure 3. Many MSOs have not partici-
units (MDUs) must be robust enough to work over pated in the digital revolution to the
existing wires.
degree they would like to because the
infrastructure is old, degraded, and is
EoC is relatively fast delivering expensive to upgrade.
higher speeds than DOCSIS.
EoC solutions are also easy to
integrate into existing infrastruc-
ture. They use lower-frequencies
than DOCSIS for the downstream;
therefore, they can work with exist- Figure 4. With Ethernet over Coax (EoC), a
ing amplifiers and splitters, bypass- fiber to an optical node (ONU) at the curb, the
service provider runs IP from its head-end over
ing them through the use of basement, a central point in the building, or
on the roof. IP traffic is streamed across the
diplexers. coax to each apartment or residence.
EoC solutions are pay-as-you-
Figure 5. With Fast EoC, service
providers can meet the needs of their
go solutions. Because they don’t require throughput basis. In customers who crave high speed con-
nectivity to the Internet so they can
the purchase of large, complex head-ends fact, Fast EoC is the
quickly enjoy the wide range digital
such as a DOCSIS CMTS, they are more most affordable EoC
applications.
practical for global service providers. In- solution on the market. More than 10
stead of paying as much as $200,000 up- equipment vendors, including Cisco, are
front to reach one customer with now shipping Fast EoC solutions. Over
DOCSIS, MSOs with EoC solutions can time, Fast EoC is expected to become
pay as little as $100 for the first user and the leading technology and will be inte-
as little as $30 per every additional sub- grated directly into CPE devices and
scriber when fully deployed. ONU/ONTs as well.
One leading EoC solution is Fast
EoC, a next-generation solution based on MSOs Now Have Hope
HomePNA technology. Fast EoC is a ro- With the advent of Fast EoC, MSOs and
bust MDU solution that delivers up to 160 other service providers can now truly
Mbit/s total system throughput to up to participate in the globalization of broad-
126 end points. Fast EoC is based on the band access and the digital revolution.
same HomePNA technology used by They can benefit from the full potential
more than 70 service providers world- of the trend by leveraging their core
wide in more than 2 million homes. asset, coax infrastructure, to add broad-
Fast EoC works over existing coax band access, VoD, interactive services,
infrastructure and coexists with many ex- and VoIP to their existing services - all
isting services such as digital TV and, at an ROI that service providers can jus-
when necessary, DOCSIS. This Home- tify. With Fast EoC, these service
PNA-based technology supports long dis- providers can quickly join this global
tances and retains very high system trend and meet the needs of their cus-
throughput - even when more users are tomers who crave high-speed connectiv-
added to the system. ity to the Internet to enjoy the wide range
Fast EoC is also very affordable - es- of today’s and tomorrow’s digital appli-
pecially on a cost-per-megabit-of- cations. (See Figure 5.) si
siliconindia
|39| October 2010
 siliconindia
Business: By Jaya Smitha Menon

I
Enriching the Entrepreneurial Ecosystem
n the year 2000, when Jassi tate. Hence the need for a chapter in this wal Rekhi, one of the founders of TiE, From high profile columnists to Innovations in busi-
Chadha told the CEO of his pre- geographic area became a necessity. who shaped his entrepreneurial dreams. ness siliconindia gives you relevant information that
vious employer that he wanted Today under the leadership of Chadha, When Lakhanpal shared his business
to quit his job and create mar- the TiE-NJ-Philly Chapter is helping idea with Rekhi, the mentor became a
truly matters to you.
ketRx, the CEO was so im- the budding entrepreneurs in this geog- venture capitalist to his first venture
pressed by the idea and so confident of raphy to realize their goals and dreams Health A-Z. The idea hit the space and
Chadha’s success that he wrote him a by conducting various events, provid- his company became a success and he
It also presents bold, forthright and objective views of
check for $200,000 and joined mar- ing mentoring, and made a profitable exit in the trends in the Indian industry.
ketRx a year later. The rest is history. In networking opportuni- 2006 to start his new ven-
three short years, Chadha had opened ties. ture SpectrMD. Talking
two offices with over 170 employees “There are aspects about his journey, Lakhan-
and realized a tenfold return on the ini- of entrepreneurship pal says, “In your journey
tial investment. What Chadha had seen like optimism, excite- as an entrepreneur, there
We bring you information, ideas and insights to help you
was an obvious need for a solution ment, energy, and a will be a lot of people who
pe.
navigate through today's changing business landscape.
provider that could transform the phar- sense of adventure will tell you why your idea
maceutical sales and marketing para- that is inspiring to will not work. A successful
digm as dramatically as the market and read and get excited. It entrepreneur never gets
industry were changing. Today, mar- also drives people to disheartened and strives to-
With its presence in the tech industry for over a
ketRx is a part of Cognizant as Chadha do more and pursue wards his goal.”
decade, siliconindia is the most powerful medium to
made a successful exit. But the entre- big dreams. However, Jassi Chadha The success stories at
reach out to the CIOs, CXOs, CEOs, VCs etc. This is why
In the journey of activities focused on the
preneur in him had this unsatiated thirst the path of entrepre- TiE are a result of Chapter readers rely on siliconindia. And make sure your
and he has begun his second innings neurship is often
lonely, hard, and the an entrepreneur, three pillars - networking,
brand catches their eyes, there is no better way to
with Axtria.
However, Chadha’s interests do not journey hectic with there will be a lot mentoring, and education.
secure your future than siliconindia.
end here. Apart from steering his own challenges of differ-
venture, he is also fostering entrepre- ent sorts. That’s why
of people who will TiE-NJ-Philly also holds
various events to initiate
neurship and growing the ecosystem. entrepreneurs need to tell why an idea these activities at both
Currently, as the President of TiE-NJ, be supported and find will not work. A New Jersey and Philadel-
successful
By subscribing
Philadelphia, a relatively new chapter the right support in
now, you'll join the phia areas in its journey to
lite group ofofreaders
TiE Global, Chadha is fostering en- programs that TiE of- foster entrepreneurship,
entrepreneur
who receive unbeatable, The only magazine that covers
trepreneurship in NJ-Philadelphia area fers,” says Chadha. the engine of growth of
never gets
op-quality venture capital news every day.
through mentoring, networking, and ed- The story of TiE-NJ- the economy.
business, technology, career, and entrepreneurship
ip
ucation. “TiE has a major role in mak- Philly is incomplete disheartened and Entrepreneurship is a
for Indian professionals in the U.S.

strives towards features frequently in dis-

ing me an entrepreneur,” says Chadha without the story of hot topic these days. It
who used to be a regular attendee at the Raj Lakhanpal, a doc-
various events organized by TiE Tris- tor turned entrepre- his goal cussions among policy $50 for 12 issues
tate at NewYork in his initial days. neur and the founding makers, academic re-
Later he began to take an active role in President of the chapter. Lakhanpal had searchers, and even in more mundane
the activities of TiE Tristate and became set his entrepreneurial dreams when he talk shows. There is a large consensus
Please send us your cheque to
a charter member. was doing his graduation in medicine. that entrepreneurship is good and
siliconindia Inc, 44790,S Grimmer Blvd, # 202 Fremont, CA - 94538
TiE NJ-Philly is an offshoot of TiE The budding doctor could see a major should be encouraged. There is also
Tristate. New Jersey and Philadephia gap in the healthcare system and his growing scientific evidence that entre- You may call us at 510-440-8249
had quite a lot of entrepreneurs who dream was to fill the gap. He realized preneurial activities matter for em-
would often find it difficult to make it to his dreams through his association with ployment, productivity, and ultimately
NewYork for various events of the Tris- TiE. Lakhanpal was mentored by Kan- economic growth. si
Write to us at: subscription@siliconindia.com
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|40| October 2010
Log on to: http://www.siliconindia.com/magazine/subscribe.php
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CIO Profile: By Jaya Smitha Menon
Driving IT
D
Being
ave Kamath was quite
futuristic with his tech-
nology vision. In the
times when business
system platforms and
collaboration tools were the jargons of
the IT companies, Kamath wrote his
technology mission with all the latest
tools, which would make conducting
business simpler and work more agile
for people. Six years before, when he
joined IDEX Corp as its CIO, the com-
pany was working as all other portfolio
companies. The company hadn’t gone
public. But his observation and study of
the business and its future did not take
him much time to realize that the port-
folio companies that were till now
working in an autonomous and isolated
manner will have to be brought under a
single umbrella. The man who believed
that the IT team of a company should
be ahead of the business, should antic-
ipate the transformations that company
can
go through in the future, and sup-
port that change accordingly couldn’t
have thought in a different way. ”It
made business sense,” says Dave the
technology guy. With this vision in
mind, he started on his technology mis-
siliconindia
|42| October 2010
One Step
Ahead of Business
sion, which cut the IT budget of the
company by half and made business
processes much faster.
It was a huge feat as the company
was in its transitioning mode, and in-
stead of operating as separate portfolio
companies, IDEX was merging and
making the operations and businesses
more integrated. This demanded lever-
aging the portfolio companies by build-
ing synergies between them and
It is imperative for IT department to ensure a
consistent performance, shirking any laid back
attitude prompted by technology complications
integrating them through an efficient IT
enterprise infrastructure, including
proper global networks. Today, Dave’s
Global Information Services team is
enabling and supporting the company’s
integration opportunities and leverag-
ing operational and market synergies
across IDEX portfolio. This is possible
only through centralization of IT infra-
structure into its own private cloud,
standardizing enterprise business sys-
tems, and providing common platforms
to enable market strategies.
However, this does not satiate this
ness process and make it more agile, he
foresees that cloud is emerging as a lu-
crative option for cost effectiveness;
however, the integration, the fragmen-
tation, and reliance on the disparate
services in the cloud are still big issues.
The security too remains a challenge,
with cyber crooks outsmarting tradi-
tional security systems. If this was not
enough the CIO also has to deal with
Dave Kamath
the different policies that differ from re-
gion to region. The knowledge of local
regulations for technology usage, gov-
ernment policies, and compliance is-
sues are very important to keep in tune
with the business needs.
As the IT leader of a billion dollar
company, Kamath believes that it is im-
portant that business stakeholders rec-
ognize a positively perceived and real
ROI on the technology initiatives of the
CIO who is always on the lookout for
company. To realize this goal, aware-
filling the gap between business and
ness is a must. Kamath spends a chunk
technology. He believes that it is certain
of his time with the actual users of all
technology constraints that have hin-
the technology he implements at IDEX.
dered many business innovations.
He listens to their apprehensions, ideas,
“Most innovations face mobility hur-
challenges, and observes their attitude.
dles and lack of standardization of
To ensure that there remains no ambi-
major platforms. There are always is-
guity, the CIO has cherry-picked a
sues cropping up in terms of reliable
team, which is a mix-match of opera-
communication and good bandwidth
tional experts and technology geeks.
and the telecom firms are doing the
Ask Kamath about the most com-
mon factor that deters an organization’s
drive for innovation and consistent per-
formance and you will get a quick an-
swer –“Nothing but ‘excuses’ or
‘resistance to new technology,” says
Kamath. A CIO is most likely to get
least to solve it. Also, whether it’s op-
into this excuses cycle at all levels, sug-
erating systems, applications, databases
gests Kamath. There might be hundreds
or browsers, the standardization
of people around to tell why the new
process is still lagging behind. For in-
technology, which the CIO plans, is not
stance, browser standard by Microsoft
a good idea. A CIO has to be self moti-
will not be supported by applications
vated and persistent to drive the tech-
written by Oracle,” he pinpoints. In
nology initiatives whether it is to get the
fact, the recent step of Microsoft to halt
adequate budget from the board or to
its support for Windows XP did hurt the
make an employee use the technology.
companies that ran Oracle applications
In fact, Kamath takes care to even
as it supported only Windows XP and
ponder at the minutest nitty gritties to
even today it’s not upgraded to support
avoid those excuses; whether it’s inad-
Windows 7.
equate network performance, non-func-
In his endeavor to support the busi-
tioning applications, or the lack of
bandwidth. As the chief of the technol-
ogy backbone of the company, he con-
siders that it is imperative for his IT
department to ensure a consistent per-
formance, shirking any laid back atti-
tude prompted by technology
complications.
Being always on his toes to accom-
plish his goals, Kamath has made his
mark throughout his career graph and
Emphasize on use of
technology-enabled
business strategies to
drive innovation,
competitive
positioning, cost
reductions, and
streamlining of
business processes is
important
even at IDEX the story remained the
same. Talking about his edge, Kamath
says, “My previous experiences in
companies like IMC and Sun Shore
were more focused on operations;
hence understanding the need of the
various departments including sales
and finance becomes easier for me.”
Kamath learnt all the necessities of
his career through accidental jobs. At
the initial days of his career, at Kraft his
company would shift him into different
roles in different departments to tackle
issues. Initially, he was involved in its
distribution and manufacturing divi-
sions. “I got into the technology side
when I became their systems analyst,
developing forecasting systems and so
on. I moved on to a distribution com-
pany three years later, a spin-off from
Sun Oil.” This stint brought good oper-
ations and logistical planning experi-
ence for Kamath. Here he focused on
service-oriented sales automation,
high-response distribution systems, and
logistics. Kamath was made CIO where
he had both operations and distribution
systems reporting to him.
His biggest leap from the small
public company Sun Shore to the $2
billion public firm IMC, renamed ‘Mo-
saic’ after Cargill acquired the com-
pany, ensured a swift turn of his career
to a man of leadership roles. He led a
shared IT services group that was re-
sponsible for providing enterprise wide
business process support, application
deployment, infrastructure, end user
customer support, security, and net-
work based services. With his engi-
neering background, he emphasizes use
of technology-enabled business strate-
gies to drive innovation, competitive
positioning, cost reductions, and
streamlining of business processes.
Today, as a member of the National
Association of Technology Profession-
als, this first IDEX CIO is aware of the
issues that the IT in the US faces at
large. The country’s reliance on off-
shore capabilities and tech elements has
deliberately widened the lack of tech
support within the US. This, in return,
has gradually slowed down the compa-
nies in the country. To improve the con-
dition, the demand is for an agile
workforce, however, this too is a con-
cern, as it’s an ageing workforce that
rules the roost in the current market,
while technology fails to stir up the new
generation workforce.
Even as the concerns stay, Kamath
doesn’t let these concerns, or in his
word ‘excuses’, slow him down and
fail in his goals, which is always re-
flected in his mantra, ‘Take away ex-
cuses, to focus on solutions’. He
understands that if people are ensured
the autonomy to perform their jobs with
less supervision, a sense of ownership
evolves within them and excuses take a
back seat. At IDEX, Dave Kamath has
created a tech environment today where
everyone is driven by the priorities to
make sure that they are a step ahead of
the innovation planned by the business
in the future. si
siliconindia
|43| October 2010
Entrepreneur 101: By Gunjan Sinha
The author is the Chairman of SiliconIndia.com and MetricStream. An internet pioneer, he was I wish to discuss opportunities for
the co-founder and President of WhoWhere? Inc., a Internet directory services company acquired budding entrepreneurs to target so-
by Lycos in 1998 as well as eGain, an online customer service company. Sinha can be reached cial entrepreneurial causes, with hy-
at gunjan@metricstream.com brid models of for-profit and

Finding Opportunities in
non-profit, creating a double profit
line of social good and economic
profits. Immense opportunities exist
for the bold and the brave to look
under the hood, looking beyond the

Social Good obvious high growth, and for high

paying consumers or enterprises to
discover new markets and needs that
can be sustainably addressed through
entrepreneurial energy in the long tail
One would have to venture off the
beaten track and find those
sustainable business ideas, which
of the human population that man-
ages to live with under $2 per day in-

address a deeper need for the

comes.
Microfinance (lending capital)

poor while providing for a scalable

for accelerating rural entrepreneur-
ship has now opened up a range of

new entrepreneurial ideas. Some of
these ideas are obvious and merit
deeper investigation. For example,
micro insurance for the poor might
be ripe for the taking, or helping im-
prove the ‘food supplies’ for the
road-side ‘dhabas’ and turning them
into ’subway’ style branded coopera-
tives might be worth studying. If you
are looking for bolder thoughts, we
business model
tion (founders of eBay) are also
doing a great work in this area. Or-
ganizations like Unitus
(http://www.unitus.com) are also
supporting many social ventures with
hybrid models of profit and social
ing Grameen Bank into a multi-bil-
lion dollar microfinance powerhouse
that has touched millions of lives? To
get this type of rewards one would
have to venture off the beaten track
and find those sustainable business

A
can leverage village Internet kiosks
into game changing education en-
gines for the rural economy by deliv-
ering ‘distance education’ over the
Internet. SiliconIndia itself is trying
to create virtual training centers
around the country, through a net-
good, should you need to raise capi-
tal for your social venture.
Over the last 2 to 3 years, we
have seen a number of talented tech-
nology entrepreneurs who otherwise
would have focused on classic for-
profit businesses, who have now em-
ideas, which address a deeper need
for the poor while providing for a
sustainable and scalable business
model. Any one for an ‘ad supported’
textbooks project for the rural stu-
dents, which can be distributed free?
Or creating ‘food parks’ in the rural

We can leverage village

work of franchisees to help drive barked on the road to social ventures. farm lands? Ideas galore, we need
lot has been discussed on opportunities at the
professional learning and growth. Do The economic climate for such social more entrepreneurs to take up the

Internet kiosks into game

bottom of the pyramid, originally a concept
we know that over 40 percent food in ventures is ripe, India is riding high, challenge.
professed by late C K Prahalad. The launch
India gets wasted and spoilt in trans- and abundant capital is available for We at the SiliconIndia.com com-

changing education
of ‘Tata Nano’, the Rs. 1 Lakh car, has put the
portation, a perfect opportunity for the bold entrepreneurs who have a munity are also committed to starting
100 year old Tata Group on the world map,
the entrepreneurially minded to strong belief in their social vision of our own SiliconIndia.org, a non-

engines for the rural

with their aspiration of building an affordable car for the
solve. At this time of evolution of change. As with everything in life, profit initiative built to become the
masses. Similarly, microfinance companies are spawning
India, we need far more entrepre- these social ventures are not easy to agent of change. Hopefully, we will

economy by delivering
new opportunities to serve the poor and the underserved,
neurs and students of rural economy pull off. They take much longer and find many more of you embarking on
while creating huge value for their shareholders. A great ex-
to help us unearth these hidden gems are typically harder to scale. How- your journey to rural and social en-

‘distance education’ over

ample is SKS Microfinance, which recently went IPO with
of creative capitalism. A number of ever, if you are successful, the pay- trepreneurship. SiliconIndia.org just
great fanfare and excitement from investors. In an an-
promising ventures like SKS Micro- backs - both financial and social - are launched this month, September

the Internet
nouncement at the World Economic Forum in Davos a cou-
finance are leading the path to trans- quite significant. Can you imagine 2010, and will hopefully democratize
ple of years back, Bill Gates highlighted the notion of
form the lives of the poor. Skoll Mohd Yunus, starting with under corporate social responsibility over
‘creative capitalism’ to address the needs of the underserved.
Foundation and Omidyaar Founda- $100 of capital 25 years back, turn- time in India. si

siliconindia
|44| October 2010 siliconindia
|45|
October 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 09.27.2010
RANK COMPANY
1 Cognizant Tech. CTSH 64 54 24 12 66 19320
2 Juniper Networks JNPR 30 32 21 11 9 15480
3 SanDisk Corporation SNDK 36 51 16 0 60 8360
4 Syntel SYNT 44 50 31 12 -11 1820
5 Microchip Tech MCHP 31 31 24 9 14 5690
6 Tibco Software TIBX 18 13 6 35 94 3020
7 Qlogic Corporation QLGC 17 22 12 16 -3 1860
8 Aruba Networks ARUN 22 14 7 34 145 2070
9 Cavium Networks CAVM 30 30 15 26 34 1320
10 Isilon Systems ISLN 24 16 4 29 293 1610
11 iGate IGTE 19 17 6 13 121 1030
12 Netezza NZ 27 15 8 84 152 1720
13 Infinera Corporation INFN 13 10 6 55 55 1280
14 Ixia XXIA 13 11 6 21 46 833
15 NetScout NTCT 20 16 16 32 49 841
16 Sycamore Networks SCMR 33 35 2 48 709 936
17 EXL Service holdings EXLS 20 20 11 17 34 570
18 OSI Systems OSIS 35 33 16 18 92 640
19 Magma Design LAVA 3 4 1 15 70 208
20 Keynote Systems KEYN 11 12 8 13 10 168

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
27.09.2010
RANK COMPANY

1 Infosys Technologies 3033 2070 1040 12 32 173376

2 Tata Consultancy Services 928 943 358 7 52 181493
3 Wipro Ltd 445 639 197 12 -24 108893
4 Tech Mahindra 776 860 205 18 -16 9715
5 HCL Technologies 418 352 87 2 25 28444
6 Mahindra Satyam 96 299 6 19 -20 11347
7 Mphasis 641 732 138 4 -4 13445
8 Financial Technologies 1231 1895 382 -11 -7 5670
9 Patni Comp 446 510 94 -18 0 5760
10 GTL Ltd 417 343 187 -1 30 4034
11 Rolta India 169 206 32 2 -4 2730
12 HCL Infosystems 118 189 63 -5 -24 2582
13 Mindtree 509 641 181 -1 -18 2018
14 Moser Baer 71 115 40 13 -28 1192
15 CMC Ltd 1924 1320 257 17 71 2903
16 Polaris Software 171 181 25 1 15 1688
17 NIIT Ltd 70 78 14 3 0 1148
18 Sasken Communications Technology 192 162 35 -1 20 524
19 Sonata Software 49 35 13 11 34 517
20 Subex Systems 52 96 19 0 -44 341

siliconindia
|46| October 2010