It is said good things come in small packs. There are over 800 startup companies in Bangalore alone. There are several others across India. If their number is an eyebrow raiser, the technologies they work on are a mindblower.

This issue is an icebreaker: You’ll hear companies you have probably not heard; what do they do, and why we think these companies hold a promise. We have spoken to about 150 companies. All of them short-listed subjectively taking into account the quality of the founders, investors, market landscape, business fundamentals as well as the company’s ability to execute thus far.

In U.S., during the peak time, before the bubble burst, most of the techies quit MNCs to work in startups for the promising career they offered. They knew newer technologies could take them to places and increase their monetary reserve manifold.

Techies who joined Microsoft, Oracle or Sun Microsystems before 1986 took the risk of working for smaller companies at that time but probably made hundreds of times more money than their fellow techies working on similar technologies in old guard well–established companies. Or to the more recent past, techies who joined Google in even 1998-2002 time frame became multi millionaires when the company went public and are enjoying their wealth.

In India too this trend will catch up. We sure hope that some of the companies we have “discovered” in this issue also join this league where their current and future employees make enormous amount of wealth from the success of their companies while they also get to work on cutting-edge technologies.

www.metricstream.com
Bangalore
India operations started in 2004.
India operations: Shankar Bhaskaran
Headcount: 100
Funding: $100 million from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, QuestMark Partners, Amerindo Investment Advisors, Sands Brothers, Azure Capital, Integral Capital Partners, Principals of Credit Suisse First Boston Technology Group, Cisco Systems, Novell Ventures, Oracle Venture Fund, Research In Motion, CIBC.


During the first three years of this century, high profile accounting scandals across corporate America diminished investors’ trust in companies. The U.S. government, in a bid to restore peoples’ faith in companies, legislated the Sarbanes Oxley Act. A whole new industry spawned around this act-compliance management solution. Some made it to the top and some faded into oblivion. However one company that stood out is MetricStream. Their compliance management solutions are parked at the top of most ERP solutions deployed by some of America’s best-known entities like Pfizer, Nektar Therapeutics, Taylormade, Wolverine Worldwide and Fairchild Semiconductors.

The current practice of deploying a separate point—solution for every regulatory compliance initiative increases the cost of compliance for an organization. The silo approach also does not provide the management team with a clear and comprehensive view into risk associated with non-compliance. Today companies are rationalizing the number of compliance systems by implementing applications that manage multiple regulations, rather than deploying a separate point solution for every compliance initiative. This reduces the cost of compliance and provides companies with a composite view of enterprise risk from non-compliance.

MetricStream’s compliance management solutions are designed from down to up pattern to support compliance with multiple regulations, industry mandates and internal initiatives. Not just has their product been on the top rung, but also the company has successfully challenged conventional marketing wisdom.

It is commonsense that to sell, one should be near customers. But MetricStream did otherwise. It based its entire marketing team in India who sold to customers in the U.S. and elsewhere. “India was a strategic part of how we build the thought process,” says Gaurav Kapoor, Chief Financial Officer. “We were the first company to realize that marketing, regeneration, sales support, inside sales, G&A can be done entirely out of India for the world markets. So a handpicked team of marketers was packed off to U.S. to be trained in GAAP, SoX.

The team selects the customers, calls them, presents online demo and sells. All done out of India—a marketers dream come true. Based on their unique marketing model, where the company has least overheads, they were recognized as the ‘poster-child’ of Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers portfolio companies.
Shankar Bhaskaran, Head, Marketing Services, MetricStream India is excited. “We are currently looking for potential talent in India—Engineering, Product management, Marketing, Sales.”

Looking at MetricStream’s technology, Nasdaq has tied up with them to offer MetricStream compliance products and solutions to all Nasdaq listed companies. This will help companies to better manage their compliance processes and potentially reduce their overall costs related to compliance efforts.



Panta Systems
www.pantasys.com
Pune, India operations started in 2004.
India head: Pradip Kulkarni
Headcount: 26
Funding: BlueStream, Dot Edu


PANTA, which in Chinese means ‘Big’ is building large computer systems for the new data centers, where applications are dynamically scheduled and deployed on grids of computing resources that can be quickly configured. A Data Center manager needs to lower costs by increasing utilization of resources and reducing administrative tasks, while delivering improved and more predictable service levels. This is where PANTA’s solutions help. If this is something that excites you, then you shouldn’t miss out the action at PANTA’s R&D center at Pune.

Figure this. The Wall Street has a huge load of data crucial to its operations. It needs to assure high standards of integrity and functionality of data analyses for its market players. And this needs to be done in a jiffy from its hosted computer environment. This is where Panta’s infrastructure comes into the picture. Supported by cost and performance efficient Infiniband- Panta’s computing platform processes stock quote analyses on low latency I/O sensitive applications. And all this happens real time.

Housing mission critical computer systems, the company ‘dynamic’ data center has utilized Inifniband’s high bandwidth and low latency characteristics to interconnect compute blades to virtualized I/O modules. This supports computer resources to scale independently from the resources used for networking, storage and graphics and dynamically reconfigure to cater to the changing data requirements.


Bally Technologies
www.ballytech.com
Chennai
Indian operations started in late 2005
India head: Srini Raghavan
Headcount: 131

It is more exciting to make the game than play it,” says Srini Raghavan about the games that his team develops out of India for the global markets.

Casino is a multi-billion industry with major tourist attraction across the world. However, its technology is centuries old, and did not see major changes until a few years back. Las Vegas based Bally Technologies is one of the world’s biggest designer, manufacturer, operator and distributor of advanced gaming devices, systems and technology solutions.

Ask Raghavan if India can truly develop games it can’t play and watch others play? He says gaming software technology domain is very interesting for technology professionals in India. Techies at Bally work on state-of-the-art projects involving core development with global teams while implementing solution for customers. “I have become fairly overconfident since I have not failed,” Raghavan says optimistically.

All the products and product development deployed worldwide is represented by Bally India and one of their biggest projects is for a company called Venetian, which is a huge operator of gaming industry in the U.S. Besides that it is doing complete menu redesigning for them. Though it is being architected in the U.S., entire development is happening out of India.


Adeptia
www.adeptia.com
Noida operations started in 1998
India head: Sunil Hans
Headcount: 45
Funding: $8 million

Adeptia’s Business Process Management (BPM) servers can Think! Think and steer information through complex multi – step processes in data machinery. Adeptia’s BPM server lets users progressively build up processes by defining simple, distinct activities that are then combined into tasks and executed by the server.

Adeptia’s slick Process Designer tool enables users to create two-way process flows through the BPNM notation. Users can synchronously and asynchronously control the process flows and experiment with context variables. The Process Designer, which was implemented as a Java Web Start application combines the convenience of a single license and install on the server that can do offline and online work on the desktop. The server also allows transformation of data from one type to another. It can, for instance, transform fields between the source and the target schemas automatically, saving time.

Innovating new enterprise software to automate business process across supply chains, Adeptia recently showcased its 4.4 version of the BPM server that accelerates insurance deployments. “Our software manages, automates and optimizes business process. This is where we can provide competitive advantage to our customers,” says Deepak Singh, President and Chief Technology Officer.

Its browser access to system logins hoards a wealth of information that can be processed through the flow log letting users search for a particular flow by name, status or date range. If you enjoy working on pre-built industry-specific templates, data formats and sample process flows for standards such as ACORD, EDI RosettaNet, AIAG/APQP and more, then Adeptia is worth a thought.

Agami Systems
www.agamisystems.com
Hyderabad
Operations started in July 2004
India head: Srinivas Chinakalapudi
Headcount: 25
Funding: $38 million from Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers,
New Enterprise Associates, Apex Venture Partners and Alta
Partners.

For a while now, storage startups have made headway in targeting niche markets that avoid them from taking the leaders like Network Appliances and EMC head-on.

Agami Systems, a newcomer to storage, is building products combining storage requirement of a SAN (storage area network) and cost effectiveness of a NAS (network attached storage). Agami’s recently launched operating system, Agami 2.0, lets users retort file systems over the WAN for synchronous and asynchronous replication. It supports snapshot scheduling and rollback, to make it easier to manage and restore after a failure. “About half of this software was developed in India,” says Srinivas Chinakalapudi, MD India. “There are lots of innovations at the file and kernel level happening from here.”

Chinakalapudi is proud that innovation comes with the ‘high-end’ engineers the company has hired—average experience and age is 5 and 28 years respectively. And intends to ramp-up to 100 engineers in two years.

AmberPoint
www.amberpoint.com
Pune operations started in 2005.
India head: Ketan Doshi
Headcount: 15
Funding: Crosslink Capital, Meritech Capital Partners,
Norwest Venture Partners, Sutter Hill Ventures

Enterprises investing in a service-oriented architecture (SOA) often find their existing management tools aren’t prepared to monitor a dynamic environment. AmberPoint’s SOA management software addresses a number of challenges, including performance analysis, exception management, validation of function and performance, and secure service delivery. AmberPoint’s customers include Best Buy, Fujitsu, Kaiser Permanente and Motorola.

“What we do here [in Pune] is both exciting and challenging,” says Ketan Doshi. “The India team has made significant contributions to AmberPoint’s engineering and has delivered in many substantial and significant projects in field releases. We are now coming up to our third release.”

Cast Iron
www.castironsys.com
President and CEO: Ram Gupta
Funding: Sequoia Capital, Norwest Venture Partners,
INVESCO Private Capital

Integration, today, is the number one pain point for enterprises. Many companies spend huge money in integration. Every dollar spent out of three is on integration says a Gartner-study. Every technologist agrees that getting computer applications and making them talk to each other is a complex, expensive and painful problem. CastIron has developed a piece of hardware called application integration appliance, which can do just that in a matter of days. CastIron believes it is going to commoditize integration.

Traditional solutions which are all the while software-based will shortly be based on hardware. “As a result customers can integrate applications in one tenth of the money which they normally spend on software-based solutions,” says Ram Gupta, President and CEO. An attempt to make painful integration delight?

Cosmic Circuits
www.cosmiccircuits.com
Bangalore operations started in 2005
CEO: Ganapathy Subramaniam
Headcount: 36
Funding: Privately funded and held

Cosmic Circuits was founded by five Texas Instruments veterans. It sees itself as a one-stop shop for all kinds of intellectual properties (IP) in analog, mixed-signal and radio frequency technology. Its core business is IP development. It has developed a 90-nm test chip with a 10 bits 1 MSPS data converter and low drop out regulator for IBM. The company is currently working on two 90-nm and one 65-nm chip for consumer electronics and communication devices. It has also developed the “Power-On-SoC” family of Silicon-proven IP cores, which includes different types of power-management IP blocks.

Cosmic Circuits is working with TSMC, UMC, IBM, SMIC and Fujitsu to develop power management circuits and data converters and 0.35-micron crystal-less silicon oscillator. “The best part of Cosmic Circuits is the bleeding edge technologies we work on, giving ample room for innovation,” says Ganapathy Subramaniam, CEO.

Good Technology
www.good.com
Hyderabad operations started in 2000
India head: Raghu Kumar
Headcount: 70
Funding: Advanced Equities, Benchmark, K1, KPCB

Perhaps the only company that provides SmartPhones to all its employees. These could be ranging form Motorola Q, Palm Treo or a gamut of other Windows-based smartphones and data cards. “We want our engineers to experience the software that we build,” says Raghu Kumar, Head of India operations.

The company develops solutions that extend enterprise applications—including Microsoft Outlook, Lotus Domino, intranets and certain web-enabled corporate applications—to mobile employees when and where they need them. With customers like Aventis-Behring, UnumProvident, CB/Richard Ellis, Liz Claiborne, Visa, Dell, Texas Instruments and EDS, Good Technology is aiming to enhance its product building modules by integrating disparate modules for its worldwide markets spread across U.S., Asia-Pacific and the Middle-East.

Infinera
www.infinera.com
Bangalore operations started in 2002
India head: Utkarsh Rai
Headcount: 100
Funding: $205 million from Accel, Agilent Ventures, Benchmark, Cypress

Optic industry was hailed as the next great thing in telecom transport. However the landscape changed when the telecom markets tanked. Many startups folded. Some like Infinera stayed afloat and are cashing in on the resurgence of Optical network equipment market.

What Infinera has done is to shrink the huge boxes used in telecom traffic and put them in a chip. The company’s PICs (photonic integrated circuits) contain 50 optical components on a single chip. These chips, the size of thumbnail, transmit and receive more than 100 GBs per second of data over long span of optical fiber. This allows service providers to increase speed and lower costs. Utkarsh Rai says, “95 percent of the software and 90 percent of system is being designed in India. Now we are developing a hardware team.” Sounds interesting? Perhaps a place to say “Honey I shrunk the Chip!”

Intransa
www.intransa.com
Pune operations started in 2005
India head: Surekha Shetty
Headcount: 30
Funding: U.S. V P, Advanced Technology, Sofinnova, Menlo

Increasing customer adoption of IP SAN solutions should bring good cheer to Intransa. The company is focused on developing network-centric, IP storage solutions. Intransa is working on modular architecture that allows the use of standard Ethernet switching for host and storage array connectivity. “IP storage solutions radically reduce the complexity of deploying scalable network storage,” says Surekha Shetty, who heads the company’s development center in India.

Intransa’s stint in India has already witnessed a successful product release. While Intransa is also making inroads into the Indian market to sell its solutions, engineers at the Pune Center can have a sense of being closer to the customer!

IP - Unity
www.ip-unity.com
Bangalore
India operations started in 2004.
India head: S. Vijayendra
Headcount: 75
Funding: BatteryVentures, InveStar Capital, Inc., Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Partech International, Firsthand Funds, Telesoft Partners, Presidio Venture
(Sumitomo Corporation), Goldman Sachs, New Enterprise Associates, Siemens Venture Capital

For an incumbant telecom operator, the biggest concern is to replace its existing infrastructure to offer customers new features. This is an expensive job when one considers the time, money and labor required.

How does one upgrade then? Companies like IP Unity have solutions that enables carriers, service providers and broadband cable providers to quickly and cost-effectively develop, deploy and manage new voice and telephony services over existing and next generation networks.

Despite cut-throat competition in the upgrade segment, IP Unity has carved a niche for itself. They have more than 100 carrier as customers and large enterprise networks deployed in 35+ countries, and is currently privately held. “Our technology touches more than 3 billion people everyday,” says S. Vijayendra, Country Manager, IP Unity.

“Over 50 percent of the research and development of the company is handled by the Indian team in Bangalore,” Vijayendra says adding India development center is the core competencey center for IP Unity.


Ketera Technologies Inc
www.ketera.com
Bangalore
India operations started in later part of 2004.
India head: Madhusudan Krishnapuram
Headcount: 100
Funding: $13 million from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers,
Foundation Capital,Integral Capital Partners, Emergence Capital Partners, and American Express

Finance executives across organizations are focused on reducing and controlling corporate spending. Everyone seems to be clinging to the on demand spend management solutions. Over the last few years, Ketera has gained good customer traction in this space.

In 2005, Ketera reached nearly $4 trillion in annual spend processing for their customers, demonstrating the explosive market call for on demand spend management solutions.

Engineers in Ketera’s Bangalore center are proud that the tools they developed are contributing to the bottom-line savings of several corporations worldwide. Ketera’s products like Spend Analysis, Sourcing, Contract Management, Procurement, Invoice Management and Supplier Connect are developed out of India. “All of the products—Spend Analysis, Sourcing, Contract Management, Procurement, Invoice Management and Supplier Connect—is conceived and developed out of India,” says Madhusudan Krishnapuram. In a short span of 18 months, Ketera’s India operation has contributed to five patents. “That shows our inherent strength in our technology and work culture,” says Krishnapuram.

Kodiak Networks
www.kodiaknetworks.com
Bangalore
India operations started in 2003.
Country Manager: Giridhar Boray
Headcount: 200
Funding: Redpoint, KPCB, Lehman Brothers

With companies like Skype making everything around voice free, perhaps the toughest market today is voice applications’. That didn’t stop Kodiak Networks to dive into this space. “We looked at opportunities in the wireless space. What struck us was how could be increase the voice usage by bringing instant group communications into wireless phones,” says Craig Farrill, CEO of Kodiak Networks.

The right kind of voice applications can drive mobile minutes usage up and give carriers a big advantage over free calling services, such as Skype. Kodiak’s solutions enable instant Push-to-Talk calling with individuals and groups at the press of a button. It provides fast and easy setup of full-duplex, mobile conference calls with up to 30 wireless and wireline participants. “You can get to other parties immediately. You can see who is available to receive calls and place calls,” says Dr. Giridhar Boray, Country Manager, India.

While large players like Nokia and Motorola offer similar services using traditional server, Kodiak offers third generation packet switching as a platform. Their customers include Orange, Singular and Airtel.

LVL 7 Systems
www.lvl7.com
Hyderabad
India operations started in 2004.
India head: Prabhat Kumar Bhagavandas
Headcount India: 150
Funding: The Carlyle Group, Gabriel, HIG and USVP

As demands in the access and enterprise networking markets increase, communication equipment designers face the challenge of delivering advanced functionality in network equipment that can grow to meet a customer's growing needs. Ethernet switching platforms that are stackable and scalable are the obvious answer to this demand. But, stackable platforms provide some distinct challenges to the design community.

LVL 7 Systems has a go-to-market model for providers of Ethernet and IP communication systems. LVL7 creates production-ready networking software that enables networking original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and original design manufacturers (ODMs) to reduce development expenses and compress development timelines. As a result, products get to market faster and at significantly lower cost. The Hyderabad development center focuses on software development activities in networking protocols, embedded systems design, and quality assurance and testing.

OpenClovis
www.openclovis.com
Bangalore operations started in 2004
India head: James Lawrence
Headcount: 70
Funding: Sevin Rosen Funds, Walden,
American River Ventures, AT&T
and Intel Capital

OpenClovis is a bet on some big trends in telecommunications. There are hundreds of network elements required to complete a phone call or a data connection. Most of the times when a call is dropped it’s because of saturation of the air interface or an error in the network.

The error could be because of failure of hardware or software or an operator’s mistake. OpenClovis’ Application Service Platform product detects the fault and recovers from that fault before the service is interrupted. OpenClovis’ solution also helps in management of network elements.

In the past, most infrastructure hardware and software was designed and controlled in-house and was proprietary to the network equipment providers.

However, rising cost pressures, increased competition, and shortened development cycles are now forcing telcos to use more commercial off-the-shelf components, while allocating internal resources to their own core competencies. OpenClovis is poised to gain from this trend.

“All of the architecture, design, implementation, validation, and deployment happens in Bangalore,” says James Lawrence, Vice President, Engineering and CTO. “Engineers at the Bangalore center have written several hundreds of lines of codes. This is very sophisticated software. What drives them is the open source platform on which our software is built.

Open source gives us the ability to get the product out there faster and more effectively into a broader market. This further fuels the engine of innovation and engineers can look up to what comes next.”

The landscape is changing. With convergence, there is increased collaboration of telcos and the enterprises. The management team at OpenClovis is keeping an eye on the opportunities that will open up.

Open-Silicon
http://www.open-silicon.com
Bangalore
India operations were started in 2003
CEO and President: Naveed Sherwani
Headcount: 60
Funding: $30 million from Sequoia Capital, Norwest Venture
Partners, InterWestPartners, Artis

Open-Silicon is offering a new route for many ASIC users to travel from concept to silicon. The company, essentially a spin-off of Intel Corp.’s brief foray into ASICs, is making bold promises about price, delivery and quality based on its unconventional approach to the ASIC business. The offer is simple: Open Silicon will deliver ASICs at a small premium-typically 30 percent-over what it would cost a design team to take the finished design to foundry. The company is also promising that 90 percent of its designs will be delivered on time and that at least 90 percent will work without metal-mask spins.

“Our open methodologies will bring ASICs to compete with platform chips,” says Naveed Sherwani, Co-Founder, President and CEO.

Dr. Satya Gupta, Co-Founder & VP Engineering adds, “At Open Silicon, we have project managers who will possess a broad skill set, but the rest of his or her team will consist of people with deep experience in specific areas. That builds up technical depth and our speed-of-response.”

Razorsight Corporation
www.razorsight.com
Bangalore
India operations commenced in 2003
Founder: Sundeep Sanghvi
Funding: $10 million from Sierra Ventures

A Gartner report says more than 80 percent of the invoices are still printed on paper and companies spend $14 billion annually to process invoices manually. Mining financial data for usable information is not easy, especially when many records are still kept in hard copy. Understanding how a company spends its money could help a manager drive out operational inefficiencies. Founder Sundeep Sanghavi says, “Companies are overburdened by disparate financial systems and huge volumes of unusable financial and spend data.”

Razorsight has a solution. It has developed an on demand spend management solution. Its technology works by scanning invoices and automatically extracting the relevant data into an electronic form and pumping it into whatever enterprise resource planning software or accounts payable business software a company currently uses.

Sanghavi says, “After installing Razorsight products, customers have saved more than $2.19 billion by reducing processing costs and exposing billing inaccuracies.” He adds the product will pay for itself by the end of one year of installing the product. For the last five since inception, the company has remained profitable and in December 2005, the company raised its first round of VC funding. Razorsight started its Bangalore office, the only one outside U.S., in 2003.


RMI Technologies
http://www.razamicroelectronics.com/
India operations started in 2003.
India head: Govind Malalur
Headcount: 25
Funding: Warburg Pincus, Benchmark Capital, Kodiak Venture Partners, Duff Ackerman & Goodrich LLC., Advanced Equities Financial Corp

RMI produces a broad line of CMOS based communications and semiconductor solutions in the wireless, infrastructure, network security and digital consumer domains. The India center is involved in R&D to develop software for their processors, verifications and designs.

RMI India is currently working on multi-faceted architecture combined with integrated networking and application-aware accelerators, creating a highly integrated QoS-enabled Ethernet over next-generation SONET / SDH carrier class solutions with low power dissipation. “Working on a 32 core processor in 90 nanometer technology, RMI’s employees are exposed to high-end architectural designing and manufacturing along with an added advantage of an initial training in the parent company,” Govind Malalur, Head of RMI India.

Soliton Technologies
www.solitontech.com
Bangalore operations was
started in 1998.
CEO: Ganesh Devaraj
Headcount: 60
Funding: Private.

Soliton is one of India’s few high technology product companies. “It is the first company in India to indigenously design, manufacture, and sell industrial digital cameras under its own brand competing with companies like Sony, Cognex, and Keyence,” says Dr. Ganesh Devaraj, Managing Director and CEO. These machine vision cameras are mounted in production lines and programmed with sophisticated image processing algorithms to distinguish good parts from defective ones and control the ejection of defective parts even at speeds as high as 20 parts per second.

Soliton’s services division provides high-end engineering services in Virtual Instrumentation using LabVIEW from National Instruments. Soliton’s engineers, working from their offices in Bangalore, Coimbatore, and Milwaukee (USA), have supplied turnkey systems and software that runs production test equipment for leading global manufacturers like GE, IBM, Intel, Ford, Hitachi, and Nortel among others.

The company has swept the most prestigious international award for the ‘Best Virtual Instrumentation Application of the Year’ 3 times in the last 6 years. In all, Soliton has received 23 international awards for its innovative work since 1998 making it a noted name internationally in Virtual Instrumentation and Machine Vision.

Sylantro Systems
www.sylantro.com
Bangalore
India operations were started in 2002.
India head: Gursaran Das
Headcount: 40
Funding: Accel Partners, BCE Capital, Mayfield Fund, Vanguard Ventures

Sylantro makes it easy for enterprises to obtain the features and flexibility of VoIP services, with no up-front costs at all. It does so by providing the platforms carriers need to provide hosted IP PBX and IP Centrex services. It is a distributed platform that allows carriers to develop and deploy a wide range of enterprise applications from a hosted environment.

Sylantros’ main products comprise application feature servers, media servers, route management servers, and element management systems. Those products provide a boost to telcos facing revenue drops from the decline in commodity voice services due largely to competition from cable companies offering IP telephony as part of triple-play services bundles.

Veraz Networks
www.veraznetworks.com
Pune
India operations were started
in 2005.
India Head: Mohan Loke,
Managing Director
Funding: ECI Telecom and
Norwest Venture Partners
Headcount: 40

With the VoIP growth rate exceeding 100 percent in 2005, Veraz is in a sweet spot. Its softswitch-based telephony solutions for traditional and next-generation communications is seeing good customer traction. A pioneer in DCME equipment, Veraz targets hardware, software and systems integration companies to enable service providers tailored with comprehensive interaction solutions to rapidly and efficiently migrate from traditional voice networks to all-IP, fixed-mobile and multi-media networks with emerging IMS standards.

Over 700 established and greenfield carrier customers experience Veraz’s packet-telephony solutions through softswitch media gateways and digital compression products, with an added prospect to reach out to Veraz’s large install base of top-tier carriers world over.

Managing Director Mohan Loke is the orchestrator of the India team, mentoring young techies through the establishment. New recruits travel to the US to familiarize themselves with the complex products holding close to 5 million lines of codes.

Virsa Systems
www.virsasystems.com
Chandigarh
India operations started in 2004
India head: Rakesh Bhatia
Headcount: 50
Funding: Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, SAP Capital
and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

We keep CEOs out of jail,” says Jasvir Gill, CEO, Virsa Systems. Virsa sells software designed to prevent employees from manipulating financial-system databases. It provides solutions that dramatically simplify compliance with regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley, by enabling customers to embed automated control design, testing, and enforcement directly into their business processes. From 10 customer’s pre-SOX, now it has almost 250.

Virsa could very well be the fastest growing private software company in the world right now. Its compliance calibrator analyzes roles of employees who use SAP ERP system and figures out whether there are potential errors in the entry-rights of the employees.
Uniquely, Virsa’s compliance calibrator sits on the same servers that run an SAP system. Meaning: accessing the most current data coursing through a company. “This allows our solution to block fraudulent activity, monitoring changes to access privileges from within SAP based on thousands of rules,” says Rakesh Bhatia, GM, India.


Virtela Communications
www.virtela.net
Mumbai
India operations were started in 2003.
Asia-Pacific head: Ronald Brouwers
Headcount: 30
Funding: $88 million from Norwest Venture Partners, New
Enterprise Associates, Palomar Ventures, Newton Technology Partners, Northcoast Technology Investors, Symantec, Juniper Networks

A global network solutions provider, Virtela offers global connectivity overnight with a single support. Virtela manages the VPN of the companies, facilitating the MNCs to focus on their core businesses. Virtela provides a unique value proposition to its customers. They analyze the infrastructure of the organization from the business and technology perspective and design optimal solutions to build a custom global network foundation with their IP Service Fabric platform, integrating security, video and voice applications. In case of the failure of a carrier, Virtela automatically shifts to another carrier which would keep the networks going.

Virtela India played an important role in the development its product, VirtelaView, wherein a customer can use it as a line interface to view everything from procurement to billing, passing through utilization, and reports. “Virtela India is a mirror image of our network operations in Denver. Going forward, we envisions the India centre as the heart of the company’s services and operations," says Ronald Brouwers, Asia-Pacific head.

Yodlee
www.yodlee.com
Bangalore
India operations were
started in 2000.
India head: Neelakantan Natarajan
Headcount: 190
Funding: Warburg Pincus, Institutional
Venture Partners, S1

Manage finances, transfer funds, track net worth, pay bills through credit and debit cards, open new accounts, buy and sell stocks, file IT returns and much more, all at the click of a button named Yodlee! Pooling in technology, developed over the last six years, Yodlee Inc. has just launched this next-generation product suite called MoneyCentre. An integrated scenario, which Yodlee, claims to be the pioneer vendor.

Founded in 1999 by a group of tech-savvy entrepreneurs, Yodlee has patented and pioneered a unique technology known as Account Aggregation. This technology aids the efficient and secure gathering of information to process and present highly personal account information from more than 8000 online sources in a single consolidated interface.

Simultaneously, enabling its users to manage and interact with their accounts more efficiently. “Yodlee’s unique aggregation technology incorporated into the industry-leading iFinity Platform is into its fifth—generation now and provides powerful functionality for personal finance, EBPP, wealth management and risk management for several leading global financial institutions,” says Neelakantan Natarajan, Vice President and Managing Director, Yodlee India.

Today 90 percent of Yodlee’s engineering workforce works from the India R&D center. Marrying into emerging technologies complimenting their style of business, Yodlee’s tech force is working towards componentizing their products to find compatibility with new browsers.

Looking to be as browsergenostic as possible? Yodlee has deployed a significant amount of automation in its Quality assurance techniques.