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The Smart Techie was renamed Siliconindia India Edition starting Feb 2012 to continue the nearly two decade track record of excellence of our US edition.

August - 2008 - issue > Outsourced Product Development

Sonata Software: Riding high on the OPD wave

Jaya Smitha Menon
Thursday, August 7, 2008
Jaya Smitha Menon
A leading software product company in the telecom domain wanted to accelerate the planned development of their next-gen product on J2EE platform, but was facing a severe scalability challenge due to lack of internal expertise. The company approached Bangalore-based Sonata Software, which specializes in Outsourced Product Development (OPD). Sonata set up an offshore product engineering lab for the client, which over a period of time scaled up in size and complexity to a team of 100 plus experts. The lab engineered 12 out of 14 products in the client’s product suite including 9 releases, 7 new products and 6 major enhancements. Sonata reduced the time required for platform validation testing for each release by 60% by building a repository of 10000 re-usable automated test cases across 32 platforms. It also pioneered the use of agile development practices within distributed teams. The client leveraged Sonata’s implementation experience to offer a scalable and cost-effective offshore-based implementation solution to telcos. Sonata was able to impact and transform the client’s business by setting up a Center of Excellence (CoE) that focused on building product/domain capability and even supported the client’s pre-sales activities. The relationship reached a new high when Sonata was chosen as the client’s global implementation partner.

Be it a start-up or a mature software product company, reduction in product realisation time is mission-critical. They are under constant pressure to upgrade and widen product offerings, augment internal skills and capabilities, accelerate product development and reduce product costs. As the market unleashes opportunities, Sonata is increasingly leveraging its core competencies – customer insight, execution excellence and product company mindset – to offer customers high-quality product development, faster time to market and lower engineering cost - and is well equipped to take on the OPD wave.

Lessons from the past
Initially, the primary focus was to develop software products in niche areas in the domestic market. Prakashak was Sonata’s leading software product targeted at the vernacular press for page composition and enjoyed good customer traction. “Prakashak was a great hit commercially. Subsequently we built Integrated Business Information Systems (IBIS) for the SMB segment,” says B Ramaswamy, President and Managing Director.

Sonata brings substantial value to its customers’ product development by leveraging its own product company mindset and IT services expertise. Having engineered 25 successful products in its formative years, product development is in Sonata’s DNA. Its presence in the IT services segment, with strong application development, implementation, integration and sustenance skills adds to its competency. For instance, the composition of the team in the OPD division is distinct. The team is structured to maximize the synergy between the skill sets of the product development team and the end-customer insights available with the IT services teams, borne out of their enterprise track record. This gives Sonata a competitive edge over pure play OPD companies.

Small Business Technologies (SBT) based in Silicon Valley became Sonata’s first customer. Sonata set up an offshore product-engineering lab that delivered a wide range of services on the client’s accounting software product, including enhancements, globalization, sustenance and replatforming. “They trusted us because we had successfully developed a similar accounting package for the domestic market,” adds Ramaswamy. The client had decided on Microsoft as its future technology platform and what clinched the deal for Sonata was the strong alliance it had with Microsoft.

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