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October - 2003 - issue > Cover Feature
Neoteris India Not Just Support Work
Rahul Chandran
Tuesday, September 30, 2003
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.

One of the earlier troubles the Neoteris team faced in developing their unique instant virtual extranet technology was that they had to necessarily have an India office. Savings on cost alone would make the decision an obvious one. But the Neoteris think tank had another and far less obvious reason for starting a development center in India.

“By starting a development center in India, we reckoned that we could turn the time difference to our advantage. By working round the clock, we ensured that development cycle was in full swing, be it in QA or in developing newer modules on our core products based on customer requested enhancements,” says Sriram Ramachandran.

Thus the India office would earn its keep, not by becoming a low-end solutions center but by becoming part of Neoteris’ extended development chain.

Moving Jobs to India?
As soon as the decision was made though, there were worries within the U.S. team about jobs being moved to India. “‘Why rock the boat,’ one employee asked me,” says Srinivas. “After all things were going fine here?’” Why take the risk of changing the whole development model? “People here had a whole range of doubts from ‘are we going to get laid off’ to ‘why bother dealing with the time difference and language barriers, not to mention the cost of setting up operations and then training people on the company’s processes.”

In some ways, their fears were justified. Neoteris encountered difficulty in finding the people with the sort of skills they wanted. “The fact that the India team worked on exactly the same kind of stuff that we did raised the bar on the sort of people we needed to hire initially,” says Ramachandran. The success of their model depended upon the team they would hire and the man who would lead it.

This time, providence came up with an answer. As it turned out, a former colleague at Healtheon (Sam Srinivas was one of the early employees at Healtheon) had relocated to India and was interested in the work Neoteris was doing. Alok Kothari had relocated to India so that he could be near his family. He was still with Healtheon when Sam Srinivas drafted him to form the core of the Neoteris India team. That was in June of 2002.

Since then, Neoteris has, almost unwittingly, encouraged the idea of relocating people to their India operations. There were no shortage of takers. With salaries and quality of living in India increasing, more and more people were looking to go back. Eventually, a team of 30 engineers were put together at Hyderabad, three of whom, including Kothari, had experience of working in the U.S.

‘N Sync
Kothari’s biggest challenge was in ensuring that the India team worked in sync with the development and QA teams in the U.S. “One of our first endeavours was to take infrastructure out of the equation, because it was evident that to work seamlessly, we had to have the variable cut down to a bare minimum.”

“The success of our model depended upon the delivery teams ability to rely on each other to hold their end up. We had to act proactively and preemptively,” Kothari says.

Another challenge was to inculcate the U.S. work ethic on a very young team. “There are things that are done very differently here, most exasperating of which is the attitude towards deadlines. Most people here work really hard to beat a deadline but would hesitate to raise the flag if they thought they couldn’t do the job on time for fear that it would reflect badly on them. That was one attitude we had to change,” Kothari says.

Technically though, the India team was as proficient as the U.S. team. “The only difference lay in the perspective that the U.S. team had developed; by being constantly in touch with the customers.”

Indeed, so well has their experiment worked that Neoteris intends to ramp up their hiring in India. “We are looking to grow aggressively in India. This does not mean we are laying off in the U.S.,” he insists. “We are still hiring in almost all the division within the U.S. office. It’s just that the wild growth will come from the India operations.”

The company is currently scouting for QA engineers for linux application software as well as technical support engineers. “These are very core jobs because typically, they will be troubleshooting for IT directors who use our products.”

Says Srinivas, “I had heard that the success of any operation for any U.S. company depends a lot on the India folks. Now I know that's true.”

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