October - 2003 issue > Cover Feature

By Rahul Chandran

IT IS NINE IN THE MORNING WHEN THE QUALITY Assurance engineer in Neoteris’ swank Hyderabad office runs into a roadblock with a certain task he has been entrusted with. He dials a 4 digit extension on the phone next to him and 16 time zones away a member of the extended Neoteris QA team picks up the phone and helps him with his query.

Doubts satisfied, the Indian QA engineer gets on with his appointed tasks. Before the day is over, he would have conferred with his colleague in Sunnyvale, CA once more, while three other engineers from the Sunnyvale office dial into the India office to confer with their project team members. And no, this is not a passed-up, time consuming testing job or piece-meal project.

For a remote access product startup like Neoteris with a team of just 70 people in all, it was imperative that the two teams work seamlessly. Not that Neoteris has any choice in the matter. The complexity of the work Neoteris has undertaken is such that the parent cannot package a piece of a project and ship it to the India subsidiary, which completes the assigned task and ships it back, as many other companies do.

Having made the decision to start operations in India, the Neoteris core management team had to devise a way to manage operations such that their India office does not become a mere back-end operation that works on non-core low end work. “The kind of environment we are in, where we sit one level above the kernel and one step below the application, it was not possible for us to farm out work piecemeal to India,” says Srinivas.

It was clear to him that the only way to make the arrangement work was by having a part of their development team and QA team in India and the rest in the U.S.. A slight hitch in the operation could potentially ruin Neoteris’ bottomlines. But the upside potentials were huge.

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