Top 25 Emerging Technologies Date:   Wednesday , May 07, 2008 Aveksa Founded: 2004 Headquarters: Waltham, MA India Center: Bangalore Investors: Charles River Ventures, FTVentures, and Pequot Ventures Headcount: 22 India Head: Bhushan Byragani Website: www.aveksa.com Poor security governance can result in inappropriate access to valuable information assets within an enterprise. The financial industry in particular faces a slew of government and industry regulations regarding access to the data assets. Aveksa automates enterprise access governance with certifications, entitlement management, roles mining, and reporting for companies to be compliant with industry and internal regulatory controls. Founded by Deepak Taneja, President and CTO and former CTO and Vice President of Engineering at Netegrity, Aveksa in Sanskrit means for ‘insight’. Aveksa has very quickly become a leader in the niche market of enterprise access governance. “Aveksa competes with companies that have limited functionality to address all the requirements of governing access. Some competitors have strengths in role mining, while others have strengths in access auditing and compliance automation,” says Taneja. The growing customer base includes leading global Fortune 1000 organizations in financial services, healthcare, transportation, and manufacturing such as Amscan, CIGNA Corporation, The Phoenix Companies, and XL Capital. “It is evident from the adoption that Aveksa’s offering has filled a critical gap for these companies. We are always excited to hear from our customers and SIs about the many successful deployments and their assertions that we are efficiently solving their access governance needs,” says Bhushan Byragani, Managing Director, Aveksa India. It is this traction that Aveksa gained in its very short period since its inception drives them to innovate and continue in the space. Aveksa has recently released its Aveksa 3.5 Enterprise Access Governance Platform, a feature-rich solution that provides organizations with an automated, policy-based approach for governing user access that mitigates access-related business risks while reducing the cost, complexity and burden of ensuring sustainable compliance. Amscan, Cigna, Phoenix and XL Capital are some of the prominent companies in its growing customer base. Axiom Design Automation Founded: 1999 Headquarters: Milpitas, CA India Centers: Bangalore, Manipal Indian Head: Ravi Shankar R Headcount: 90 Prominent Investors: Dr Prabhu Goel, S Atiq Raza, and Raj Singh Website: www.axiom-da.com A decade was enough for Axiom to be known as a complete verification solution provider in the world of ASIC & SoC. Spanning the complete design verification tools spectrum from simulation and debug & functional coverage to multi-clock domain verification and design rule checking, Axiom pioneered development of advanced functional verification products and services. To tackle the verification challenges that multiply with each new generation chip, Axiom’s integrated verification environment coupled with services provides the right solutions to the ever-demanding customers. Axiom’s tool suite comprises Verilog/SystemVerilog simulator with advanced test bench automation, assertion based verification, debugging, and a very practical and highly productive functional coverage specification & measurement technique. Axiom trod to India in May 2007 via an acquisition of Bangalore based SysChip Design Technologies. "The SysChip acquisition brings AXIOM an outstanding R&D, support and service team that has developed a powerful, complementary technology," says Badru Agarwala, CEO of Axiom. "With SysChip's domain knowledge and verification expertise, AXIOM can now provide to its customer's total verification solutions ranging from tools to services to complete outsourced verification,” he adds. Currently, Axiom’s two Indian centers focus on technology development and outsourced R&D activities in ASIC design and verification. “With strong presence in tools, methodologies and high end design services space, we are in a position to address our customers’ challenges in ASIC/SoC verification,” says Ravi Shankar, MD, Axiom India. Talking about the differentiating factor, Shankar says that Axiom is a technology led services company. “Some of our tools are unique to us and address very directly the practical problems of design & verification closure. This helps our customers reduce cost and risk associated with their complex projects. Our tools are proven in production and are shipping with repeat business from customers located worldwide,” he adds. Aylus Networks Founded: January, 2005 Headquarters: Westford, MA India center: Bangalore India Head: Dr. Mohan Sharma Headcount: Over 30 Investors: Matrix Partners and North Bridge Partners Capitalization: $25 Mn Website: www.aylus.com After developing push-to-talk technology for mobile phones and the wireless industry’s first softswitch, Aylus’ founder Dr. Shamim Naqvi has now tackled the next wave of mobile innovation. Aylus has addressed the new era of emerging communications trend requiring sharing of rich multimedia contents across wireless subscribers. It has developed revolutionary multimedia share services that will transform the way mobile subscribers communicate in emerging wireless networks. Mobile operators deploying Aylus technology allow their subscribers to significantly enhance standard voice calls through the sharing of various multimedia — all with one simple click on their mobile phones. “While in the middle of conversations you are able to share events involving video, audio, photos and songs with other subscribers. You can also share these contents with users of the emerging social networking sites such as FaceBook and MySpace while archiving them in a personal storage locker. It provides a great opportunity to enhance services and ROI for the upcoming 3G wireless operators in India” says Naqvi, the founder, chairman and chief executive officer of Aylus. The company’s software can be used in most of the latest mobile handsets. Last year, Aylus was also named ‘Top Innovator’ at 3GSM Asia Congress in China. Azul Systems Founded: 2002 Headquarters: Mountain View, CA India Center: Bangalore India Head: Pramod Thangali Investors: Accel Partners, Austin Ventures, Credit Suisse, Meritech Capital Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Velocity Interactive Group, and Worldview Technology Partners Website: www.azulsystems.com Azul Systems is pioneering the concept of network-attached processing, designed to support business-critical Java applications. If you have an Azul box installed on your network, your little app would instantly and mysteriously run upto 50 times faster! Azul makes custom multi-core server appliances, a kind of Java co-processor that sits on the network providing compute assistance to various Java applications running on many different machines. While Java is a flexible and elegant language, large apps aren’t always very fast — the biggest problem being processor delays caused by Java’s automatic garbage collection routines. Azul handles garbage collection in hardware rather than in software, making it a continuous process that keeps garbage heap sizes down and performance up. The proposition that Azul’s devices offer is to transparently offload applications from the Java Application Server to the Compute Appliance, where multiple processor cores and large memories are at the disposal of the application, all managed by the Azul Virtual Machine with no change to the original application. “We have separated the functionality from the server and put it in the cloud,” says Pramod Thangali, India MD. At a time when businesses increasingly demand that CIOs turn app development projects around quickly to support business side innovation, an appliance like Azul’s could present peace of mind – since it lets you add tremendous horsepower to app dev projects as needed, while ensuring the rest of the business-critical apps built in Java continue to run smoothly. BA Systems Founded: 2005 Headquarters: Bangalore, India US Office: San Jose, CA CEO: PJ Singh Headcount: 34 Investors: BVP, Silicon Valley Bank, Gold Hill Capitalization: $12 Mn Website: www.ba-sys.com When a startup surfaces at any part of the world, their first challenge is to demonstrate and convince the already choice-choked public how the new entrant is different. For BA Systems, the recognition and identity came early as the first Indian Enterprise Core and Edge Managed Router manufacturer and acceptance by some very marquee and demanding customers. BA Systems offers an efficient alternative to endless box buying with a one-stop managed connectivity solution for complex networks. The company claims to be the developer of the industry’s first cost effective networking products designed for developing economies. “We have built the networking products with emphasis on better management and CapEx OpEx savings. Since our R&D is based in India, we are in a position to respond and customize to our customer requirement very fast. This reduces our channel partners go to market time and in turn can pass on some of the benefits they find with our solution to their customers,” says PJ Singh. In November 2007, the company hogged limelight by introducing the first made in India router, one that was designed in Bangalore and manufactured in Chennai. Berkeley Design Automation Founded: 2003 Headquarters: Santa Clara, CA India Center: Bangalore India Head: Ravi Subramanium Investors: Woodside Fund, BVP, Matsushita Electric Industrial, and NTT Capitalization: $17 Mn Website: www.berkeley-da.com Started with the idea of building a new simulation tool to help design the analog circuits in a better way, Berkeley Design Automation (BDA) today is a household name in the EDA industry. The company provides design automation tools for next-generation analog, RF, and mixed-signal integrated circuit (IC) verification. The company’s Precision Circuit Analysis technology provides true SPICE accuracy 5X to 10X faster than any other tool. BDA’s breakthrough product is the Noise Analyzer, based on the company’s Stochasitc Nonlinear Engine, used for the noise analysis of analog or RF integrated circuits that incorporate a phase-locked loop (PLL). To combat the challenge of accurate Analog and RF circuitry the company has built two main simulation products: Analog FastSPICE and RF FastSPICE, which are ideal for difficult verification challenges such as multi-day or multi-week long simulations that otherwise cannot converge. These products require no block-level tuning and are fully compatible with today’s popular SPICE simulators, RF simulators, and their environments. Celestix Founded: 1999 Headquarters: Fremont, CA India Center: Chennai India Head: Guna Ramireddy India Headcount: 15 Website: www.celestix.com It was projected that by the end of 2007, 80 percent of all security products would be purchased on appliances with 40 percent growth for appliances in SMB. Cashing in on this opportunity is Celestix Networks, a developer of Microsoft Windows-based managed security appliances, offering a broad range of ready-to-deploy security appliances and turnkey security solutions. Its appliances are designed to reduce product complexity and provide customers with less expensive, easy to use delivery platforms. “Our proven hardware appliance is powered by software that is clearly differentiating and makes our security solutions very easy and seamless to deploy and reduce the total cost of ownership,” says Guna Ramireddy. Currently, the company offers plug-and-play solutions for key security infrastructure requirements to address firewall, branch office connectivity, cache/proxy, wireless policies and authentication, remote access (SSL and traditional VPN), two-factor authentication, and anti-spam and anti-virus gateway deployments. To date, Celestix has enlisted over 430 channel partners worldwide to help serve its end customers. Some of its customers include Microsoft, RSA Security, Xerox, Tommy Hilfiger, MetLife, SingTel, Dreyer’s, Schlumberger, Domino’s Pizza, Hilton Hotels, and Wake Forest University. DiVitas Networks Founded: April 2005 Headquarters: Mountain View, CA India Center: Bangalore India Head: Jodi Prins DiVitas India Co-founders: Prasad Rao, Ajay Mittal and Varad Seshadri Headcount: 30 Investors: Clearstone Venture Partners and Menlo Ventures Capitalization: $23 Mn Patents: 20 Website: www.divitas.com Until now, people had only three network options for communication at work – landline, cellular, and Wi-Fi. However, DiVitas has found a fourth way that combines all the three – extending a desk phone onto a personal mobile phone by bringing inter-operability between the cellular and Wi-Fi networks to provide seamless mobility. “In simple terms we offer a solution that can be termed ‘Reach and Respond’: Any person can be reached and be responsive immediately from anywhere,” says Vivek Khuller, Founder, DiVitas. Easy to deploy on converged mobile devices, the DiVitas Mobile Unified Communications solution identifies the type of network in the vicinity of a person and seamlessly transitions the device from a cellular to a Wi-Fi network and vice versa. The increasing usage of converged mobile devices for enterprise use is an indication of the market potential that lies ahead for DiVitas. To make more use of the opportunity, the company has also identified opportunities beyond voice communication service such as mobile IM (instant messaging) for enterprise use. It plans to roll out Presence and IM applications that companies can deploy and monitor themselves using the DiVitas server to prevent security breach. To tap the growing market, apart from having engineering teams in the U.S. and India, DiVitas has also strategically placed sales teams in Europe, Singapore, and Korea. Khuller also plans to raise a third round of venture funding to build a strong sales and customer support team. Today, the company rides high on the wave of success with 20 patents to its name and over 50 customers in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. DiVitas came into limelight last year when it bagged 14 top awards in the U.S. and Europe for developing the most innovative technology of 2007. Ensim Founded: 1998 Headquarters: Santa Clara, CA India Center: Pune Indian Head: Sandeep Phadke India Headcount: 100 Investors: New Enterprise Associates, Worldview Technology Partners, Focus Ventures, Amerindo, Sumitomo, Goldman Sachs, CMEA, and Charles Schwab Capitalization: Over $100 Mn Website: www.ensim.com We have been talking about ‘convergence’ for long. But now the talk is about unified communication, and the one name that comes to mind is Ensim. It provides management software for messaging and collaboration infrastructure. Service providers and enterprises worldwide use the company’s products to enable deployment of integrated solutions, simplify and automate secure management of complex environments, and increase user and IT productivity. Ensim’s Unify Shared Edition enables service providers to create, control, and deliver hosted IP and application services ranging from unified messaging, collaboration, and web hosting. Ensim is now redefining change management in the enterprise space,” says Sandeep Phadke, GM, Ensim India. Its Unify Managed Edition is a system management software solution allowing Managed Service Providers (MSP) to administer and automate their customers’ mission-critical application infrastructure. Unify Enterprise Edition redefines user provisioning and access control software for Microsoft Active Directory, Exchange and mobility applications such as BlackBerry Enterprise Server and Windows Mobile. Available as snap-in tools or a full suite, Ensim Unify allows organizations to decrease operating costs, improve workforce effectiveness, and meet security and compliance goals. Moreover, through its Ensim Unify Saas edition, Ensim is betting on SaaS market, which is a potential market of 10.7 billion by 2010. Using the Ensim Unify SDK, indipendent software vendors (ISVs) can create Service Managers, which are ready-to-deploy software connectors that integrate their application with the resources and functionality of the Unify Platform and enable the Application to be delivered in a SaaS model. Microsoft is Ensim’s biggest partner. It also maintains strategic partnerships with many leading infrastructure vendors including Research In Motion (BlackBerry), Hewlett-Packard, Accenture, Siemens and BroadSoft. FaceTime Communications Founded: 1998 Headquarters: Belmont, CA India Center: Bangalore, started in 2004 India Head: Sridhar Vutukuri Headcount: 85 Investors: Credit Suisse, Sutter Hill Ventures, JK&B Capital, and Scale Venture Partners Website: www.facetime.com In today’s fast paced world, requirement of superior execution and speed is driving the demand for real-time communications in organizations. However, the rapid and disruptive adoption of ‘greynets’ – real time applications such as instant messaging (IM), web conferencing, social networking sites and peer-to-peer file sharing - is a new reality for enterprise IT security. FaceTime Communications enables organizations to eliminate these risks through award-winning solutions that secure and control greynet communications in the enterprise. FaceTime’s value proposition is in enabling businesses to leverage the benefits of the new Internet by delivering enterprise-grade solutions that provide management, security and compliance across the broadest set of consumer and enterprise collaborative applications. “No other company has a complete suite of solutions to address this problem. Our solutions allow organizations to manage real time applications at different levels depending on the need and profile of the employee,” explains Sridhar Vutukuri, Vice President and Country Head, India. Now an organization can allow the employees to access IM applications for chat, voice and file sharing, depending on their work requirement. Today, more than 800 customers including nine of the ten largest U.S. banks use FaceTime’s solutions. FaceTime’s solutions enable organizations to get visibility into and control over the use of social networking and other Web 2.0 activities, as well as over standalone real-time communications applications like IM and P2P and unified communications environments like Microsoft Office Communications Server and IBM Lotus Sametime The company now plans to expand its focus on greynets in the enterprise with the addition of new capabilities meant to provide enterprise IT managers with control over the use of social networking sites like FaceBook, LinkedIn, MySpace and other Web 2.0 applications. There are over 140 social networking sites, 20,000 individual Facebook widgets and more than 700 Web 2.0 applications. Future plans include developing a complete suite of solutions for risk management and leakage protection over VoIP. InsideView Founded: 2005 Headquarters: San Francisco, CA India Center: Hyderabad India Head: Sesha Rao Investors: Emergence Capital, Rembrandt Venture Partners, and Greenhouse Capital Capitalization: Series A funding $7.5 Mn Website: www.insideview.com InsideView is a pioneer in on-demand Business Search and Intelligence applications. Taking advantage of the convergence of social media and enterprise applications – what it calls “Socialprise” – the company brings the insights gained from subscription-based and user-generated sources to the enterprise. InsideView’s business applications sit at the junction of traditional enterprise applications and social networks and present a mash-up of the information and the user experience between these once disparate areas. The company represents a unique technology that uses Web 2.0 features to address sales issues in the enterprise. As a part of expansion strategy, InsideView acquired TrueAdvantage in November 2007. Recently, it announced a new product, SalesView, specifically designed to mash-up social data with search and intelligence capabilities to help sales teams monitor data sources, deliver alerts, automate prospecting, discover connections, present extraordinary relevance and user specific intelligence to accelerate sales cycles, and close more deals. Majority of software development, testing, and product deployment is done from India Center. Aggregation and structuring of global content providers’ data, Socialprise implementation, and Business search and intelligence are delivered by the India Center. This high quality challenging work of India Center has attracted bright engineers with patents and paper publications from IITs, BITS Pilani, and from reputed MNCs such as Microsoft and Yahoo. InsideView’s major differentiation from its competitors is, delivery of Sales 2.0 intelligence in a Web 2.0 environment of a complete product that provides Aggregated, Integrated, and Actionable technology. Current CRM integration partners are Salesforce.com and SugarCRM. InsideView’s other strategic relationships are with Reuters, Hoovers, and many more. InsideView’s customers include Ariba, Centive, Cisco/WebEx, JobScience, Lucidera, Rearden Commerce, ServiceSource, SuccessFactors and Symantec. This April, the company won Beagle Research Group’s 2008 WizKid award, making it to the list of seven companies honored for reinventing business processes in their specific industries. Kirusa Founded: April, 2001 Headquarters: New Providence, NJ India Centers: Bangalore, New Delhi India Head: Taranjit Singh Batra, VP- Global Sales Headcount: Over 100 Investors: Helion Ventures, Nexus India Capital, Qualcomm Ventures, Eastven, and Erasmic Website: www.kirusa.com In the wake of changing industry dynamics, telecom operators look at Mobile VAS, like graphics, wallpaper, ringtone downloads, to provide the next wave of growth. Kirusa decided to develop a better way for people to send and receive short voice messages, which they have termed as Voice SMS. Similar to Text SMS, it is a fast way to send a short message that can be retrieved on the receiver’s end at his convenience. One click and you are listening to your message in the voice of the sender. You can also reply with your own voice, or forward the message to any other mobile. The Voice SMS service also has features like DirectListen, International Voice SMS, SIM Tool Kit Application, Language Customization, Call Completion and Convergent Voice SMS. “The uniqueness of the platform is that it offers interoperability between carriers, and provides an open framework for the third parties to deliver applications,” explains Raja Moorthy, Head of Engineering. The platform used by Kirusa has the ability to manage and synchronize data and voice interactions, while its integration with IMS and other standards enables operators to cost effectively deploy additional revenue generating services. To further enrich its platform, Kirusa today is concentrating on making the platform interoperable between different networks like GSM, CDMA, IP based and fixed line. To enhance its scope, Kirusa has also partnered with various communication solutions provider such as HP, NMS and Nuance. Since deploying its innovative Voice SMS solution at Grameenphone, Bangladesh, in late 2005, Kirusa has roped in 20 customers across three continents and reaches 175 million subscribers globally. LifeSize Founded: 2003 Headquarters: Austin, TX India Center: Bangalore India Head: Raghu Belur Investors: Austin Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, Sutter Hill Ventures, Lehman Brothers, and Pinnacle Ventures Capitalization: $81 Mn Website: www.lifesize.com In this era of globalization, video conferencing has emerged as a cost effective way for companies to keep in touch with their counterparts. Breaking new barriers in the enterprise video conferencing market is LifeSize Communications, a provider of HD video conferencing solutions. “The human face speaks in a universal language. When people can see one another, communication is greatly enhanced. Unlike a telephone call or an email exchange, video gives instant feedback.” says Craig Malloy, CEO, LifeSize. Using LifeSize systems, enterprises and new users looking to leverage the benefits of video can turn any room into a telepresence room without high costs or complexity. Its ‘LifeSize Express with Focus’, a recent product, is the world’s first high definition video communication system that makes an HD telepresence experience possible over any broadband. For mission-critical video communications networks, LifeSize has also announced the release of new core management and infrastructure solutions for enhanced system management, remote policy enforcement and improved access to legacy video networks. "LifeSize India development center in Bangalore focuses on end-to-end product development for our Networking and systems management products," says Raghu Belur. Developers at LifeSize India have complete product ownership for these products and work on architecture, analysis, design and development of industry leading products. They also have the opportunity to work with technical leaders and innovators in the industry in a challenging, flexible and fun work environment. Today over 200 organizations are a part of Lifesize's quickly growing customer portfolio including Accenture, Lockheed and Barclays Capital. Shortly the company will also showcase its products and customers at Interop in Las Vegas. OATSystems Founded: 2001 Headquarters: Waltham, MA India Center: Bangalore India Head: Sarath Chandershaker Investors: Matrix Partners and Greylock Partners Website: www.oatsystems.com Founded by Prasad Putta, Sanjay Sarma, and Sridhar Ramachandran, OATSystems is the first to offer RFID middleware solution enabling many of the early RFID pilots and deployments. Its flagship software is designed to help companies make business sense of supply-chain data collected by RFID devices. OAT has over 200 deployments worldwide, and has focused on delivering packaged solutions for retailers, consumer products companies and industrial manufacturers. OATSystems has applications for supply chain management, shelf availability, asset tracking, and work-in-process to help manufacturers like Airbus and Hewlett Packard to streamline their assembly line and supply chain operations. Its RFID middleware and industry solutions are used by large high profile companies from the retail sector such as Tesco and Best Buy, consumer products such as Kimberly Clark and Procter & Gamble, and industrial manufacturers such as Airbus, Hewlett Packard, and Tyco Electronics. "We transform data captured by RFID readers into something 'real', in line with what our company believes, 'transforming RFID data into value' where the real benefits of RFID can be reaped," says Sarath Chandershaker, MD, OAT Systems India. Pronto Networks Founded: 2001 Headquarters: Pleasanton, CA India Center: Bangalore India Head: Vaidhya Raman Headcount: Approximately 100 Investors: BV Capital, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and Intel Communications Fund Website: www.prontonetworks.com Pronto Networks, a WiMax Forum member since 2005, provides carrier-class Operations Support Systems (OSS) that enable network operators manage large public WLAN networks. It offers provisioning, authentication, access control, pre-paid and post-paid billing, and roaming settlement services. The biggest challenge for operators is finding a back-office solution that can handle their specific requirements. Vaidhya Raman, heading Pronto’s worldwide Operations team from the Bangalore office explains, “Pronto’s OSS platform is unique as it can handle all of these requirements. It also supports service control and bandwidth guarantees for individual users of a ‘mixed use’ environment with various groups such as city employees, residents, and visitors being offered secure Internet access on separate logical networks while sharing the same infrastructure.” Pronto also offers a Managed Services Platform (MSP) for back office operations functions, including network monitoring, 24/7 customer service, billing and revenue distribution, and system maintenance for a monthly fee. The UniFi OSS is designed to support multiple vertical segments of the public WLAN industry, besides traditional WiFi hotspots in the hospitality, retail, and campus markets, all in a single platform. APAC operators are also deploying the solution as a converged broadband services platform. QL2 Founded: 2003 Headquarters: Seattle, WA India center: Gurgaon India Head: PM Thomas Headcount: 70 Website: www.ql2.com For the ones who think that Web search is still primitive, here is a reality check. QL2 provides what it calls market intelligence to big businesses – supplying companies with instant access to critical information from the outside world. QL2’s on demand services deliver market intelligence directly to business users when they need it – without the time lag or technical complexity common with other approaches. QL2 serves customers who need to have precise information at their fingertips. It constantly scours the Web and adds the latest information to its databases. Its specialty is harvesting unstructured data and information hidden behind registration. It automates the data collection and provides data sets that companies load into their research systems gateways. Pharma companies use QL2 to keep tabs on research and products moving through the regulatory pipeline. Airlines use it to see competitors’ flights and prices, so they can adjust their offerings. This year QL2 crossed its 300-customer mark across 38 countries. Serus Founded: 2001 Headquarters: Mountain View, CA India center: Bangalore India Head: Giriraj Vengurlekar Headcount: 10, growing to over 25 in 3 months Investors: OVP, Samsung, Diamondhead, Zap, and Angel Investors Capitalization: $15.8 Mn Website: www.serus.com Serus, a provider of technology and managed services for companies with distributed or outsourced manufacturing operations, wants to grab much share in the Intelligent Operations Management (IOM) market. The good news is that Serus’ products have greatly benefited its 125 portfolio companies including AMD, Cisco, Flextronics and internal manufacturing sites. Today’s environment where manufacturers design anywhere, make anywhere and sell everywhere; only half of mission-critical data resides within a business' own four walls. The remaining half is held by partners, customers, and suppliers and incorporated into the public domain. Serus streamlines and accelerates this dataflow process by providing multiple data source integration and improving inventory and financial liability visibility and end-to-end. Serus IOM Platform allows the companies to readily access all manufacturing information, analyze process status, make informed decisions in context, and collaborate across the ecosystem. “We differentiate from others as we combine our product offering with content. We facilitate and take responsibility to bring in the content needed to make faster, smarter, better time critical decisions in outsourced manufacturing environments,” says Indu Navar, Founder and CEO, Serus. “We also hope to revolutionize the software industry. We do not follow the old software model where customers are asked to purchase the software license and then spend T&M to implement the software and hire internal IT folks to maintain the software. In this model there is no accountability by one entity,” she adds. Serus delivers service, which is delivered based on Service Level Agreements and Milestone accomplishments. Sloka Telecom Founded: 2004 Headquarters: Bangalore, India U.S. Center: New Jersey, U.S Indian Head: Sujai Kurampuri Head Count: 30 Investors: Self and Angel Investors Website: www.slokatelecom.com What the French town Saint Medard en Jalles should remember Bangalore for? To know the reason we have to turn the time cycle to November 2007 when Sloka Telecom made the first deployment of its product to power France’s first 5.8 MHz WiMax network in this town. It was the first WiMax base station in France. Considered a pioneer in providing solutions for next generation wireless networks, Sloka’s base stations are compact that can be flexibly deployed on walls, poles or roofs, saving substantial deployment costs. What makes Sloka different is its team’s incessant urge to achieve cost effectiveness through variegated innovation. The company provides broadband wireless solutions to address requirements of cellular operators and network equipment in emerging markets. Before starting this venture, Sujai Kurampuri, the founder of Sloka had been nurturing a project worth an investment of $6 million but he failed to convince VCs about the potentials and success possibilities of his project and had to slash down his venture plan by half to $3 million. But ultimately Sloka ended up in developing their key product within $1million! Sloka Telecom earns revenue by direct sale of its products to operators, service providers, Wireless ISPs, and System Integrators as a network equipment vendor, and also as OEM (original equipment manufacturer) supplier to other network equipment vendors. Besides, the company is also engaged in research, design, development, testing, sales (direct and indirect), support, and maintenance of its products and solutions. Sloka is also partnering with top chipset makers and equipment manufacturers. Though it plans to remain as an OEM in future as well, the company is hunting for new opportunities emerging from green field deployments of broadband wireless networks, migration from older 2G/2.5G networks to newer 3G networks, which require newer and better network deployment strategies. After Saint Medard en Jalles city municipality in France and a major wireless company in Canada, Sloka Telecom is in talks with Indian operators now. Solidcore Founded: 2003 Headquarters: Cupertino, CA India center: Delhi, Gurgaon Investors: JAFCO Ventures, Matrix Partners, Menlo Ventures and Sevin Rosen Funds Website: www.solidcore.com Change is a fact of life in any evolving business, but IT organizations today are constantly firefighting to ensure their IT services stay available in light of constant changes. Today, unauthorized and out-of-policy changes account for nearly 80 percent of all IT service outages. Organizations worldwide trust Solidcore to assure compliance with the Payment Card Industry (PCI) and Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) standards, to improve service availability, and achieve faster returns on their ITIL and IT service management initiatives. Solidcore helps organizations by tracking changes on their critical infrastructure in real-time, determining if the changes are authorized, and enforcing change policy by selectively preventing unauthorized change. Solidcore also provides change control for embedded systems and is used by major device manufacturers to securely leverage open systems to meet their business requirements. Solidcore has partnered with leading technology companies in the world to provide customers with fully integrated and seamless solutions for achieving control over their IT environment. Solidcore S3 Control integrates with HP (including Opsware), BMC, IBM, and CA to ensure all change, whether in process, emergency, or ad-hoc is captured, documented, and correlated against authorization. The company recently introduced the S3 Control PCI Pro and PCI Starter Editions designed to help merchants of all sizes easily and cost-effectively address the file integrity monitoring and audit trail requirements outlined in sections 10 and 11 of the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS). Many leading companies use Solidcore to add control to their change management systems, including Convergys, General Motors and Sharp. SOMA Networks Founded: 1999 Headquarters: San Francisco, CA India Center: Gurgaon, set up in 2006 India Head: Jatinder Ahuja Headcount: 60 Investors: Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, NeoCarta, Presidio, Sanyo, Sharp and Temasek Capitalization: $175 Mn Website: www.somanetworks.com SOMA Networks is one of the first broadband wireless access company to offer fully converged, all-IP solutions for world-class service providers. SOMA’s FlexMAX Mobile WiMAX System and SoftAir Multimedia Application System provide standards-based, leading-edge technology that enables service providers to differentiate themselves with simultaneous multi-megabit and multimedia services, drive revenue using value-added applications to increase average revenue per user (ARPU) and deliver wire line performance over a broadband wireless infrastructure. Revenue-quality voice over IP (VoIP) with fax support, broadband data and video applications are key components of SOMA solutions, as are the company’s award-winning macro base stations and subscriber gateways. SOMA’s all-IP architecture also makes it easy for service providers to integrate their offerings with other IP-based application servers that streamline billing and provisioning. “With the adoption of Mobile WiMax standard (802.16e-2005), Broadband wireless deployments will begin in earnest in 2008. As these networks grow, both in subscriber volume and ubiquitous coverage, we will see additional multimedia offerings delivery over these networks,” says Yatish Pathak, Founder and CEO, SOMA Networks. Today SOMA operates with over 15 partners worldwide that include Intel, Oracle and Xilinx. The company has recently scored a major deal with BSNL in India for a fixed-use network. The networks will cover Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Maharashtra and Goa where the user base is estimated to be about 250 million. SpikeSource Founded: April 2003 Headquarters: Redwood City, CA India center: Bangalore, Chennai India Head: Ramesh Shastri India Headcount: 75 Investors: Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers, Fidelity Investments, CMEA Ventures, DAG Ventures, and Intel Capital Website: www.spikesource.com While the open source has created a highly successful collaborative development model, many open source solutions lack support services to facilitate broad adaptation by small, medium and large enterprises. SpikeSource works with the open source projects and Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) to bring solutions to market on a common platform by distributing, managing, integrating and supporting open source applications across the enterprise. It has recently launched the SpikeSource Solutions Factory platform, the industry’s first fully automated platform for assembling, testing, packaging, certifying and updating open source, proprietary and hybrid software solutions. The platform dramatically reduces the time and cost required by independent software vendors to build and maintain the highest quality software solutions. By tightly integrating with global distribution networks of strategic partners, the Solutions Factory also allows ISVs to market and sell their solutions worldwide at a fraction of the typical cost. The SpikeSource Solutions Factory is a game-changing platform that fundamentally shifts the way software is developed and delivered,” says Kim Polese, CEO, SpikeSource. The India center houses the core development team working together with the company’s Silicon Valley engineers. “Major software development work on the SpikeSource Solution Factory is being carried out in India. Hence, SpikeSource India will see a significant increase in hiring for its Bangalore and Chennai offices,” says Ramesh Shastri. Stoke Founded: March, 2004 Headquarters: Santa Clara, CA India center: Bangalore, set up in 2008 India Head: Ashim Roy Headcount: 15 (by end of May) Investors: Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, Integral Capital Partners, Pilot House Ventures, Presidio STX, DAG Ventures, and Reliance Technology Ventures Capitalization: $50 Mn Website: www.stoke.com To capitalize on the growing global telecommunications market, operators must reduce the number of discreet devices required at the network edge to lower costs and simplify the rapid transformation required to enable the mobile Internet. Stoke is cashing on this opportunity by developing multi-access convergence gateways to help fixed, mobile, and Internet-based operators. The Stoke Session Exchange, an integrated software and hardware platform, enables network operators to deliver multimedia services over an unprecedented subscriber experience within and across fixed, cellular, Wi-Fi and WiMAX access networks. “Unlike other players who keep adding functions into existing devices to address user demands, we develop multifunctional devices that are easily programmable. People can use the functions they need and discard the ones they do not require but add them later if needed,” says Roy. Collapsing a router, a Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) appliance, a security gateway, and a Quality of Service (QoS) device into one has made Stoke’s devices cost effective in terms of rack space and number of subscribers routed per device. Though working together with the U.S team, the India center will start developing products at the global level and address the needs of the Indian and regional markets. Unlike most MNC’s, Stoke India center operates like a regular startup where engineers are involved in getting supplies to setting up the computers and the IT infrastructure. However, employees have start of the art work stations with dual monitors to help improve productivity. Since the facility was opened a month ago, the center is humming with activity with 10 employees involved in various stages of product learning and software development. Stoke is looking ahead to an exciting 2008, replete with new opportunities to offer carriers new tools to address their growing concerns and needs, such as what’s happening at the edge of the carrier networks with regard to new devices, increased volumes of content, unlicensed access, video increasingly stressing those networks, 4G technology, and so on. Stream Processors Founded: 2004 Headquarters: Sunnyvale, CA India Center: Bangalore India Head: Dr. Raghunath K. Rao Headcount: 40 Investors: Austin Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners and Woodside Fund Website: www.streamprocessors.com A spinout from Stanford University, Stream Processors (SPI) believes it can solve one of the key problems of parallel processors - the difficulty of programming them. SPI is revolutionizing the media and signal processing markets with a new generation of high-efficiency DSPs that offers more than a tenfold increase in performance combined with full software programmability. SPI’s breakthrough Stream Processor Architecture harnesses parallel processing in a familiar single-core C programming model allowing manufacturers to adopt a software-based model to slash costs, accelerate time to market, and add competitive differentiation. A standard C programming model with compiler-managed data movement and a single instruction flow, vastly simplifies the software development effort while allowing 1000’s of instructions to be in flight every clock cycle. SPI has been shipping its first chips, called Storm-1, since late 2006 into video and image processing applications. They are made on TSMC’s 130nm process. Its tools include a development kit, fast functional debugger library, and target code simulator. Vanu Founded: 1998 Headquarters: Cambridge, MA India center: Bangalore India Engineering Head: Pradeep Malhotra Website: www.vanu.com Vanu Bose, son of acoustics leader Amar Bose, founded Vanu Inc as the result of early software radio research conducted at MIT. The company develops software radio solutions for cellular operators and wireless service providers worldwide. Vanu’s Anywave is the first wireless infrastructure solution commercially deployed that enables individual base stations to simultaneously operate GSM and CDMA while allowing a seamlessly upgrade path to future wireless standards. It also recently announced their new MultiRAN shared active infrastructure product that allows carriers to share active base station elements, including software, while independently managing their portion of the network. Vanu recently launched its Professional Services Group, to assist rural carriers in designing network build out with services that can map coverage areas and predict roaming traffic. Vanu started its India software development center at Bangalore in Dec’2007. The center not only focuses on new waveform development but also on supporting the local customers. It offers a unique opportunity to software engineers to learn SDR technique to build different wireless waveforms completely in software. Also, the company provides an exceptionally high focus on software engineering standards. Zmanda Founded: April 2005 Headquarters: Sunnyvale, CA India center: Pune India Head: K K George India Headcount: 14 Global Headcount: 50 Investors: BlueRun Ventures, Canaan Partners, Helion Venture Partners Funding: $13 Mn Website: www.zmanda.com Zmanda’s roots are around the popular open source backup project community: Amanda. Chander Kant and Paddy Sreenivasan founded Zmanda, a second-generation open source company, inspired by the business models of Red Hat and MySQL. Zmanda’s goal is to bring simplicity, security and low-cost of ownership to enterprise backup and recovery marketplace. “Zmanda aims at SMBs and departments of large companies who are reluctant to pay the price of backup and recovery software from proprietary vendors and it is 90 percent cheaper compared to others,” says KK George, India Head. With Zmanda Recovery Manager (ZRM), MySQL database administrators (DBAs) can backup all MySQL servers running on Windows, Linux, Solaris, and Mac OS X. This open source project was designed and developed entirely by Zmanda’s development team in Pune. The company since its inception continues to be in good traction with its recent acclaim as ‘MySQL Partner of the Year’ by Sun Microsystems.