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May - 2007 - issue > Cover Story
Top 25 Emerging Technology Companies
ST Team
Tuesday, May 8, 2007
Airtight Networks
Founded: 2002
Headquarters: Mountain View, CA
Funding: $36.75 million
Investors: Siemens VC, Walden, Trident Capital, Granite Venture, Blueprint Ventures, CMEA Ventures
Company started in Pune in 2002
India Head: Pravin Bhagawat
Headcount: 140
Website: airtightnetworks.net

In the next three years, close to 70 percent companies in the U.S. are expected to run on wireless networks. Wi-Fi networks will be the next breeding ground for cyber crooks. Cyber criminals are building expertise in wireless technologies to steal information from individual users and corporates. So far only five percent of the large enterprises worldwide have deployed solutions that would help protecting their information from wireless threats. The estimated potential for such products in the U.S. alone is close to $1.4 billion, as compared to $3 billion for the world market.

Airtight wants to grab as much share of the wireless intrusion prevention market as possible, that too quickly. The good news is that there are very few solid players in the wireless security space and Airtight already has the lead. However, infrastructure vendors-those who provide WLAN solutions-pose a challenge as they have begun to incorporate security capabilities into their solution. “It’s cost effective for companies to go for an integrated solution, though they miss out on various critical aspects of pure wireless security solution,” says Jai Rawat, Vice President of Product Management. He hopes that just like Checkpoint, in the wireless world, customers will recognize the need to have best-of-breed security solution. To manage the threat, Airtight has partnered with the infrastructure vendors.
Airtight is crossing the chasm right now. It has been successful in getting its product to the early adopters. The company is now looking at early majority. The opportunity is there. Airtight has to continue to focus on execution and stay ahead of the
competition.

Aperto Networks
Founded: 1999
Headquarters: Milpitas, CA
Funding: $139 million
Investors: GunnAllen, JK&B Capital, Canaan, Alliance, Innovacom, JAFCO, Labrador Ventures, and Tyco.
Bangalore Operation started in 2006
Headcount: 40
India Head: Raghu Santamavattur
Website: apertonet.com

If there is a WiMax specialist around the corner it should be Aperto Networks. The company has been hedging its bets, pumping research and development funds into both 802.11n and WiMAX—a longer-range broadband standard.
WiMAX is roughly five to 10 times faster than most of today’s WiFi networking gear. Aperto has been a pioneer to develop WiMAX solutions. Aperto’s wide range of base stations, subscriber units, and related equipment enables carriers to offer profitable broadband wireless services in diverse markets via IP-rich, point-to-point and point-to-multipoint networks. Its solutions are deployed by 200 carrier customers in 65 countries.
Aperto is keenly watching the rapid growth in broadband connectivity in India. Aperto has deployed its solutions in networks of close to dozen operators across India including BSNL and VSNL. It continues to capture a dominant share of the Indian WiMAX market. There’s an awe feeling among engineers in the company’s Bangalore R&D center to work for a company that is founding member and a key contributor to the 802.16 standard and also the founding board member of the WiMAX Forum.

ArchPro Design Automation
Founded: 2004
Headquarters: Milpitas, CA
Bangalore center was setup in 2005
India Head: Puneet Jethalia
Headcount: 32
Funding:$5.5 million
Investors: Intel Capital, Entrepia Ventures, and Sage Technology Ventures
Website: archpro-da.com

With the proliferation of electronic gadgets, OEMs are making sure that they offer the best of the features to consumers. More applications packed into the small mobile device only means a big strain on the battery life. So going forward, more than the feature sets power will become the differentiating factor. Power will have a profound economic impact. At the same time with the changing geometries of design process, IC and Soc designers are facing low-power design challenges. The move to finer design geometries will cause designers to address multi-voltage situations up front due to the need to incrementally save power across a large number of transistors.

“Going forward we need tools that take holistic view of the entire chip design. The newer tools should capture the complex, yet fundamental, link between the functional, electrical, thermal, and mechanical aspects of power management,” says Pratap Reddy, CEO.

“Engineers at ArchPro’s Bangalore center see this as an exciting opportunity. “The fact that they are solving some of the most pressing IC development challenges facing the industry today keeps them motivated and challenged. They love to develop a product that will have a major impact on designers in a very short time,” says Puneet Jethalia, Managing Director of ArchPro India.

ArchPro has developed unique EDA products for solving power management design challenges in IC/SoC designs at 90nm and below. Its integrated design solutions help engineers design and verify multi-voltage architecture in a well-defined, top-down flow.
ArchPro is doing everything right by building a solid technology foundation, attracting key customers, and strengthening its engineering, field support, and executive management at the perfect time to capitalize on the opportunity that low-power design throws up.

Arcot Systems
Founded: 1997
Headquarters: Sunnyvale, CA
Funding: Accel, Adobe, Goldman Sachs, INVESCO and VISA International, Raza Ventures
India Center: Bangalore
India Head: Rajgopal Krishna
Headcount: 90
Website: arcot.com

Online authentication is no more limited to username and password. Banking regulatory agencies worldwide are stressing on the importance of adding one more layer of authentication, churning security companies to bring in OTP (one-time-password) tokens. But these hardware tokens are bound to perish out of business argue Arcot Systems, with its new software based PKI authentication technology. “PKI hardware technology has been in existence for a longtime now, but Arcot’s software approach—wherein a small file gets stored on customers’ computers in lieu of the smart card or OTP token—is bound to make big strides in the market,” says Ram Varadarajan, the CEO. ArcotID, that forms the File and the Pin to access it, is bound to be adopted by large industries and would be extended to other security-sensitive works like e-statement, digital signatures et al, believes the CEO. “Our India team forms the biggest chunk of our workforce, executing world class engineering,” says Varadarajan.

Atrenta
Founded: 2001
Headquarters: San Jose, CA
Funding: $43 million
Investors: Venrock, TL Ventures, Smart Technology Ventures, Investcorp Technology Ventures, Investor Growth Capital
Noida operations started in 2001
India head: Sushil Gupta
Headcount: 225
Website: atrenta.com

Dr Ajoy Bose’s footprint in the EDA industry made him wonder if the hardships of designing complex chips could be minimized. This led to his establishing Atrenta, which pioneered a product that gives engineers an early visibility into their design risk and helps them figure out the best way to debug their design. The product is called SpyGlass.
A design analysis platform, as Bose calls it, correlates RTL coding violations with schematics (automatically generated) to detect the structural problems before it reaches the gate level.

Bose believes that there is no other company that takes a complete view of the entire design cycle, and hence Atrenta has no direct competitor.
Bose’s awareness of the market opportunity and appreciation of scalability of business has helped Atrenta create a niche for itself.

Axentis
Founded: 1999
Headquarters: Cleveland, OH
Investors: JP Morgan Partners, Sierra Ventures, Key VP
India Center: Established in Bangalore in 2004
India Head: Gopinath Reddy. Headcount: 41
Website: axentis.com

Sarbanes-Oxley is the name that rings when you think of the changed legal environment post Enron investigation. The issues of compliance touch all organizations, which are faced with unprecedented pressure to manage corporate reputation and performance. Over the last few years there has been an explosion of compliance tools to help companies to run their governance, risk and compliance initiatives.
One such company that made an early move into this segment is Axentis. It has built expertise and assisting companies with the implementation of governance, risk and compliance programs. Axentis is leveraging the SaaS model to deliver consistent workflow, reporting, security, and content and learning management. Today, the company is in a sweet spot. It experienced a terrific growth in 2006—it increased its user base to more than 720,000. With a firm grounding in risk management, an excellent track record for performance and a scope that ranges far beyond the SOX Act, Axentis here to gain as the compliance market unfolds.

Azaire Networks
Founded: 2003
Headquarters: Santa Clara, CA
Funding: approx $30 million
Investors: Investor Growth Capital, Rustic Canyon Partners, Woodside Fund, Convergence Partners
Bangalore operations started in 2004
India Head: Sridhar Kolar
Headcount: 45
Website: azairenet.com

In an era of dramatic changes to telephone services, one of the hottest new market phenomena is fixed-mobile convergence (FMC). Mobile operators are recognizing they are in a new business — providing mobile broadband services to users who want their data, games, video and other information anytime, anywhere. Azaire Networks promises the marriage of IP and the cellular world. The company offers a hybrid network approach, wherein users get the best of both worlds: the cost-effective connection of an IP-based network with the mobility of cellular networks. With this operators are able to shorten time to market for a full line-up of data, voice, and multimedia services that increases revenues and ARPU.

The company which has previously aimed its work at GSM and UMTS carriers has recently launched a new product that supports CDMA networks.

According to ABI Research by 2011, some 250 million users will be making and receiving phone calls over converged fixed-mobile networks and access points, and the capital expenditure in FMC infrastructure is expected to exceed $450 million by 2011. This should be good news for Azaire.

Evergrid
Headquaters: Fremont, CA
Founded: 2005
Investors: Acartha Group
Pune operations was started in 2006
India Head: Radha Shelat
Head Count: 14
Website: evergrid.com

Evergrid has exciting range of products and technology focused both on online and batch applications. High availability for batch applications, continuous availability of online applications, live migration of online applications, resource utilization based on dynamically controlled resource prioritization are among various technologies company is developing.

Evergrid has an interesting development model. It has two R&D centers, one in Pune and one in Blacksburg. The two teams are focused on entirely different products; with some overlap in the underlying technologies, each team works very independently starting with a “concept” to a ‘‘complete product”.

Pune development team is excited about the research and development work around online applications. Pune team is exclusively working on multiple problems like live migration; continuous availability using active-active replication, continuous availability using checkpoint and roll forward recovery. First product from Pune will roll out by end of this year.

In a batch computing environments, users deal with jobs that take days, weeks and sometimes months to process. They often have to restart these jobs from scratch due to system failures. “The high performance computing industry lacks the proper tools for restarting jobs on large clusters. Administrators must keep a close eye on their clusters, break jobs down into different chunks or try running jobs on smaller systems in order to avoid the pains of system failures,” says Radha Shelat, VP & India GM.

Evergrid software captures the complete state of the application execution, it is transparent to the OS as well as to the application. By recording the state of the application, Evergrid is able to checkpoint and recover from failures rapidly with minimal overhead. The software also allows data centers to do preemptive scheduling of lower priority applications in favor of running higher priority applications, with little or no data lost.

Live migration of online application requires transparent migration of application from one server to another. It is a challenging problem, application state is migrated to a target server in a way that there is no loss of state and application is continuously available. Clients connected at the time of migration should migrate seamlessly without loss of connectivity.

Force10 Networks
Founded: 1999
Headquarters: San Jose, CA
Funding: $300 million
Investor: Crosslink, Meritech, Morgenthaler, NEA
Chennai Operations started in 2005
India Head: Prakash Sripathy
Headcount: 90
Website: force10networks.com

According to a market report by Dell'Oro Group, annual revenues from 10 Gigabit Ethernet Switch port shipments handily topped $1 billion during 2006. The report ranks Force10 as the No.2 vendor, next only to Cisco. With the market expected to grow to $4 billion by 2010, Force10 is here to gain.

Force10 products offers ultra low switching latency to Ethernet allowing IT managers to capture the computing benefits of high performance cluster architectures using a familiar and easy to manage technology.

After establishing itself in the 10-gigabit Ethernet market, the company is moving into the rapidly growing security market. The combination of the two could prove lucrative. Force10’s security appliance helps companies scan through traffic at speeds of 10 gigabits per second and look for security threats that could compromise the network. The appliance directly embeds security rules and signatures into hardware to speed up processing, inspection, and monitoring of network traffic.
Analysts say the move to meld switches with security will push Force10 deeper into networking giant Cisco Systems’ territory.

Intacct Software
Founded: 1999
Headquarters: San Jose, CA
Funding: $30M approx
Investors: Emergence Capital, Deloitte and Touche, Goldman Sachs
Bangalore operations started in 2003
India Head: Ashish Vaishnav
Headcount: 30
Website: intacct.com

Intacct is an on-demand financial management application provider for small and medium enterprises. Most of its engineering works including requirement analysis, design, coding and testing happen in India. Engineers in India are also involved in building the core product roadmap and critical customer deliverables.
Intacct believes today that its employees understand that pith of any profession lie in bonding with their company, “especially in a product company like ours where you see customers either choosing or rejecting features you build, there is great sense of ownership and commitment,” says Ashish Vaishnav, the General Manager of India.

Adding to this mindset of Indian engineers, On-Demand application delivery, the Software-as-Service (SaS) model and open source development platform have evolved tremendously, making Intacct to win mind share of dedicated techies. “With recent success of Salesforce.com and frequent talks about On-Demand model by Microsofts, Oracles and IBMs of the world, Intacct may just have proved its long term belief in their business model and remember Intacct has already put in eight years building their financial ERP suite whereas others are just beginning to talk about the subject,” says Vaishnav. With seamless customization and online delivery of business application, Software-as-Service is a beauty at best.

Kasenna
Founded: 2000
Headquarters: Sunnyvale, CA
Funding: $60 million
Investors: US VP. Alloy Ventures, SGI, Artiman Ventures, AsiaTech Management, CIR Ventures, Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein London, Intel Capital, Key Venture Partners
Bangalore operations started in 2005
India Head: Ram Kordale
Headcount: 33
Website: kasenna.com

Engineers at Kasenna’s Bangalore center are busy engineering applications that enable consumers to watch TV online, whatever they please at any given time (video-on-demnd, as it is known). Kasenna’s suite of products, viz. distribution and delivery platform, middleware and distribution management applications helps ‘get the video from the network to the consumer’.
Stressing that the India center is much more than a mere backend operation, Ram Kordale, Head, Kasenna India says “Techies here get to work on not only Kasenna’s entire product line, but also on all stages of the cycle like development, Q&A, deployment and tech-support. The origination to consummation engagement keeps them hooked.”

The company is in talks with several Indian telcos to roll out IPTV in India, and an announcement is expected shortly.

Mformation Technologies
Founded: September 1999
Headquarters: Edison, NJ
Investors: Battery Ventures, Carmel Ventures, Deutsche Bank, Kingdon Capital, Intel Capital, North Bridge Venture Partners and Visa International
Bangalore operations started in May 2005
India Head: Bhasker Sharma, Country Manager and Director – India Operations
Website: mformation.com

Engineers at Mformation are celebrating. The company’s Service Manager product was recently recognized as the best service delivery platform product by the GSM association at this year’s 3GSM world congress. Being recognized on such a platform speaks of their knowledge of the wireless environment—a key ingredient to move forward in the new mobile era.

Mobile operators around the globe are looking at ways to increase their revenues. With increase in mobile phone usage and proliferation of newer handheld devices, there are ample opportunities for mobile operators and service providers to gain new customers, launch compelling new services and grow revenues. For instance, data services like email, picture messaging, Internet access and push-to-talk are gaining momentum and generating new revenues for mobile operators.

However, the biggest challenge for these operators is that there is a broad array of wireless devices in the market today, ranging from low-end phones with basic functionality to smart phones. In such a complex mobile landscape, it is becoming increasingly difficult for operators to offer services and manage mobile devices of diverse operating systems (including Linux, Microsoft Windows Mobile, RIM and Symbian OS devices), network protocols and third-party software applications.

In order to put mobile operators around the globe in control of service delivery, Mformation offers solutions that enable mobile operators to rapidly accelerate data revenues and reduce support costs. Some of the largest mobile operators in Asia, Europe and the U.S including Sprint, Nextel, T-Mobile, Telefonica and Vodafone, have deployed Mformation’s solutions to launch a wide range of exciting new services and branded offerings to the broadest possible subscriber audience.

Engineers in Bangalore who are behind making Mformation’s solutions enjoy the technical challenges that confront them. They work in multiple areas such as engineering development, QA, R&D, solutions architecture, and technical support. What connects Mformation’s Bangalore team is a combination of innovation, expertise, tenacity and confidence.

NeoAccel
Founded: 2003
Headquarters: San Jose, CA
Funding: Baring Pvt Equity Partners, NTT Finance
Navi Mumbai operations started in 2004
India Head: M. S. Prasad
Headcount: 100
Website: neoaccel.com

Michel Susai, the founder and former Chairman and CEO of NetScaler, started his new company NeoAccel and is challenging the giants such as Juniper Networks and F5 Networks

He focused NeoAccel on the rapidly emerging market for SSL VPNs - network systems that enable a browser-equipped PC to securely access enterprise applications. With a high-performance system architecture under the hood, NeoAccel’s SSL VPN-Plus delivers site-to-site access functionality of conventional IPSec VPNs.
“Our technology enables users to almost completely eliminate the adverse impact of packet loss of any kind,” says Susai. He adds, “Our SSL VPN Plus is also optimized for wireless environments.”

Founded in March 2003, NeoAccel is funded by Barings (former venture arm of ING), NTT Communications and technology angel investors such as Prabhu Goel, Sabeer Bhatia and others including Susai’s NextStar Venture.
“Although a relatively late entry, NeoAccel is seeking to make up time by capitalizing on a ignificant fundamental technology flaw with existing SSL VPN products,” said Michael Suby, Senior Research Analyst for Stratecast Partners, a Division of Frost & Sullivan.

NeoAccel’s solution provides injected latency of just 10 milliseconds (ms) for VoIP calls and video conferencing sessions, eliminating the performance problems that have until now made SSL VPNs unacceptable for real-time applications such as VoIP and video conferencing between multiple corporations.

NetDevices
Founded: 2003
Headquarters: Sunnyvale, CA
Funding: Artiman Ventures, Columbia Capital, Castile Ventures, JumpStartUp Venture Fund
Bangalore operations started in 2003
India head: Uday Birje
Headcount: 50
Website: netd.com

While Cisco, Nortel, Huawei and the likes were riding high on the success of their fleet of networking products-namely routers, switches, gateways et al., three Cisco employees realized the need for a combined box that would incorporate the functions of all the said devices. Seenu Banda, Rob Haragan and Jeff Kidd founded NetDevices in 2003, and after two years was born its first product-the Services Gateway, the India center accounting for over 90 percent of the R&D behind it.

The PDA approach of bundling all services into a single device has helped garner favorable reviews from analysts.

The company is working closely with the customers, adding functionalities desired by them, taking their feedback, and following a services approach. To understand customer sentiments better, the company sends its engineers, who work on the product, for deploying the devices. This works the other way round, helping the engineers gauge customer requirements better and work on improving the product line.

Netxen
Founded: 2002
Headquarters: Santa Clara, CA
Investors: Accel, Benchmark, Integral Capital, DAG Ventures
India Center: Pune
Website: netxen.com

Netxen aims to bring a paradigm shift in today’s datacenters. The company is pushing 10 Gigabit Ethernet technology into the datacenter in order to advance enterprise datacenter performance and agility. NetXen builds network processors and network cards that send data at 10 gigabits per second over conventional Ethernet networks, 10 times faster than typical server network equipment today.

Protocol Processing Engine (PPE), which is the foundation of NetXen’s intelligent NIC product portfolio, has been designed to process billions of operations in one second, with low latency and low power consumption, making it ideal for server applications.
Considering IT departments demand consistent networking features and functions across OS platforms in heterogeneous environments, Netxen has recently announced support for the Linux environment.

With 10 million servers sold every year, and with most of the major server OEMs like IBM and HP, adopting NetXen’s solution, the company’s CEO Govind Kizhepat predicts that two to three percent of them would have 10GbE connectivity to start with, and increasing to 20 percent with wide spread adoption of 10GbE in datacenters. NetXen is on its way to tap into this emerging market, making a successful business out of its innovative technology and solutions.

Nevis Networks
Founded: 2002
Headquarters: Mountain View, CA
Funding: $40 million
Investors: NEA, BlueRun Ventures, and New Path Ventures
Pune operations was set up in March 2003
Headcount (India): 130
India Head: Ajit Shelat
Website: nevisnetworks.com

With the enterprise perimeter fast disappearing because of an increasing mobile work-force and a growing number of non-employees accessing LANs, enterprises are looking out for innovative LAN security products. Nevis Networks is cashing in on this trend.
Nevis Networks reckons it’s the first to come up with an appliance for managing internal threats that doesn’t get in the way of users. Deployment can be in the LAN, for remote access users, in the Data Centers and for Wireless and guest users. “Our LANenforcer appliances identify users Kerberos authentication, and then automatically associate them with their access rights,” says Ajit Shelat, Senior Vice President Engineering.

Nevis claims its LANsecure operating software is faster at what it calls “endpoint posture checks”, and enables each appliance to handle three times as many users. It can also synchronize its user-based application access policies with existing identity management systems. The Nevis scheme works by applying policies at the firewall to control what applications, services, and resources each device and user has access to. Nevis LANEnforcer is also unique in that compared to other NAC appliances it offers post-connect IPS with full fledged Signature Matching, Protocol/ Traffic/Behavior anomaly checks done and flagged off. The company is already seeing an increase in customer adoption of its innovative ASIC-based LANenforcer systems worldwide.

Roamware
Founded: 2002
Headquarters: San Jose, CA
Investors: DCM, Shelter Capital, Accretive, Primera Capital
Mumbai operations was started in 2001
Delhi operation was started in 2005
India Head: Manoj Pant, Managing Director
Headcount (India): 270
Website: roamware.com

According to Global Mobile Roaming Report, the number of roamers will grow from 210 million in 2004 to 850 million in 2010, largely on the back of a higher number of occasional business travelers and holidaymakers becoming mobile roamers. Operators across the world are looking to monetize on this opportunity by offering services that could be geared specifically for the inbound or outbound roamer.

Roamware has established a firm footprint in the mobile roaming market. It provides a comprehensive bouquet of value-added voice and data roaming solutions and mobile connectivity solutions. It boasts of customers across 110 countries, spanning over 280 mobile operator networks with services being available to over 700 million mobile consumers globally. "We constantly innovate to bring in service offerings that open up new revenue streams for operators and content providers, enabling new methods of advertising, mobile commerce and content monetization," says Bobby Srinivasan, CEO of Roamware.

Earlier this year the company unveiled its next generation consumer application MediaCall, which enables callers to share media within a phone call, such as a clip from a movie or a music video. Once the call is completed, the receiver can purchase and download the content onto their mobile phone.

Sanovi Technologies
Founded: 2002
Headquarters: Burlington, MA
Funding: $9.2 million
Investor(s): Bayfleet, ATV
Bangalore operations started in: 2002
India Head: Raja Vonna
Headcount (India): 45
Website: sanovi.com

Sanovi Technologies, a provider of Application Continuity and Disaster Recovery management software company, is targeting the $5.3 billion DR market. Says Raja Vonna, its co-founder and VP of Engineering, “Though there is a lot of money invested in Disaster Recovery infrastructure by various companies, CIOs often are skeptical about the recoverability of their mission-critical applications, as there are no tools available to monitor or manage their overall DR solutions.”
The founders of Sanovi, recognizing this gap launched Panaces Application Continuity Manager (ACM) software, which enables customers to monitor, maintain and manage application continuity. With its patented technologies in DR management, Panaces™ enables continuity virtualization of enterprise applications in a holistic manner. Sanovi’s easy to deploy and implement ACM provides enterprises with the real-time ability to monitor and manage application continuity with automated workflows utilizing the existing database, replication, storage and network technologies. Its benefits include centralized control for enterprise-wide application continuity, covering DR drills/ testing, automated incident management, flip-of-switch Failover/Fallback and real-time monitoring of continuity metrics.
The fact that its co-founder operates out of Bangalore gives techies in the company confidence of their head office’s commitment to the India technology center. Additionally, it helps drive down the senior management’s vision in a much more effective manner. Says Vonna, “Contrary to other companies, which look at the India center as supplementary to their R&D functions, all of Sanovi’s activities viz. architecture, design and development are driven from Bangalore. With its world class DR interoperability lab in Bangalore, this team participates in the whole product development life-cycle and holds some of the US patents.”
The company’s customers are both in India and the U.S. Prominent among them are UTI Bank, Bank of Baroda, L&T and HDFC Bank in India, and Empirix, Warner and Millennium Partners in the U.S.

Sequence Design
Founded: 2002
Headquarters: Santa Clara, CA
Investors: Focus Ventures, GM Asset Management, IVP, Lake Street Capital, Menlo Ventures, Sigma Partners
Noida operations started in 2003
Headcount: 30
Website: sequencedesign.com

Currently, leakage eats up nearly 30 percent of the battery in electronic devices,” says Vic Kulkarni, President and CEO, Sequence Design. “That leaves a tremendous opportunity in the area of power management.” Kulkarni and his team at Sequence working on tools to tackle the low-power design challenge. Until now, power analysis of a design was done utilizing tools that report power consumption of a design at various stages of the design cycle. Sequence’s tools are potentially a paradigm shift in the way power is looked at in a design.

In 2006 the company’s bookings grew nearly 20 percent and it added 15 new customers to its global roster. Some of its marquee clients include IBM, LSI, and Broadcom.

Skelta
Founded: 2002
Headquarters: Bangalore
Investors: SIDBI Venture Capital
India Head: Sanjay Shah
Headcount: 110
Website: skelta.com

Business process management (BPM) initiatives remain a top priority for many organizations because of the proven ability of available solutions to boost operational performance while maximizing the value of existing systems. The true promise of BPM technology lies in the ability to tie together business functions that involve the interaction of multiple people and disparate systems. This can be a daunting task without the use of workflow automation tools.

Skelta’s BPM workflow software integrates quite well with Microsoft technologies such as InfoPath, BizTalk Server, and SharePoint thereby allowing users to leverage on their existing investments. “We are ahead of the curve,” says Sanjay Shah, CEO of Skelta as he explains about enterprises move towards service-oriented architecture (SOA). Skelta's integration with Visual Studio .NET as a developer platform, puts it in a vantage position to aid with this shift towards SoA.

With prominent customers like Motorola, Siemens, EDS, Deloitte from across the world, Skelta is a case of 'local to global' company. All of Skelta products are designed and developed for a global market out of Bangalore.

Sonim Technologies
Founded: 1999
Headquarters: San Mateo, CA
Funding: $70 million
Investors: 3i, Accel, Apax Partners, BV Capital
Bangalore operations was started in 2005
Headcount: 65
Website: sonimtech.com

Companies around the world are on hot pursuit of a new voice and data technology that promises to bring drastic cuts in telecom bills and make communication cheaper and easier. VoIP is poised to explode as packet-based IP networks become the default communications platform of the wired world. Besides significant cost savings, VoIP and Wireless VoIP will transform the telecommunications landscape with new and more sophisticated product offerings.

Wireless VoIP on the other hand, is still in infancy – despite increasingly large investments by majors like Cisco, Siemens, Ericsson, and Nortel. Among these giants, Sonim is unique in the fact that they have already deployed commercial wireless VoIP services to several of the world’s largest mobile network operators – making Wireless VoIP a reality today. Sonim was able to make this happen through a powerful combination of superior technology and a business model that rewards the entire wireless value chain…a combination that led to the industry adopting Sonim’s technology as the basis of a new industry standard for VoIP-based push-to-talk technology, called “OMA PoC”.

Sonim’s mobile VoIP platform was designed to deliver high-performance push-to-talk and “push-to-X” applications on today’s GPRS, UMTS, EVDO, WiFi and WiMAX data networks. With an impressive clientele, including Telefonica, Vodafone, KPN and others, Sonim is already adding value for mobile network operators across the world.
Sonim’s India team plays a key role in delivering on the company’s success, as they own end-to-end product engineering. Sonim’s engineers, have mastered skills in IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystems) and IP technologies (such as Push to Talk over Celular, SIP, and VoIP on mobile/wireless networks). The geeks at Sonim share a passion-to design and build innovative products that enable information to extend beyond our desktops and come to our handsets. Joakim Wiklund, Sonim’s Chief Technology Officer says, “The best part of working at Sonim is the ability to make a difference. There is freedom to innovate and the opportunities for growth are amplified. And what’s more exciting than working on an emerging technology?”

Stratify
Founded: 1999
Headquarters: Mountain View, CA
Funding: Mobius Venture Capital and In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the CIA
Bangalore operations started in
India head: Pravin Mittal
Website: stratify.com

Stratify currently provides Electronic Discovery services to many of the AmLaw 250 and leading Fortune 500 corporations. Its Legal Discovery service provides law firms and general counsels with comprehensive eDiscovery capabilities for early case assessment and efficient review. Among primary features of its solution are concept-based review, near-duplicate management and visual email analytics.
These enable customers to achieve review rates that are significantly faster than in-house systems and other online review systems. Moreover, Stratify’s feature support for European and complex languages such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean in a single review application removes language barriers typical of today’s expanding global economy.

Veveo
Founded: 2003
Headquarters: Andover, MA
Funding: $14 Million
Investors: Matrix, Norwest, North Bridge
Bangalore operations started in 2004
India Head: Rakesh Barve
Headcount: 40
Website: veveo.tv

With growing “small factor devices” like phones, PDAs, set-top boxes and so-called micro PCs, the world will soon witness a surfeit of such always-networked and high-memory devices. Small in screen size and bereft of dexterity, these devices would constrain the display and make inputs (through mouse, QWERTY keyboards) toilsome; in turn making the process of searching for contents and information a boring task.
Veveo is developing network based technologies comprising of search and clustering algorithms and real-time content transformation systems to specifically address content and information retrieval problems for “small-factor devices.”

“Technology and methods developed for web search from PCs are not adequate for important use cases from such devices because of device characteristics and important differences with respect to what and how users will search and browse from such devices,” says Rakesh Barve, Director of Software.

With Veveo’s technologies, consumers can use their phones and remote-controls to very easily search and retrieve information from huge video, music, TV and other databases owned by cable/telecom operators and content companies, as well as in general from the internet. “Furthermore, internet content (web pages and videos) designed for PCs or TVs-only, will be transformed by our technology to real-time to look good on these small devices,” adds Barve.

Veveo is one of the technology startup working in the IP TV space that has its complete engineering workforce based out of India.

Verismo Networks
Founded: 2005
Head quarters: Cupertino, CA
Funding: Angel/Seed
Investors: Prakash Bhalerao
Bangalore operation setup in 2005
India Head: Abhay Dubey
Headcount: 70
Website: verismonetworks.com

IPTV is gaining prominence across the world. IPTV is often used to indicate video transmission ability on an IP network/the Internet. “However a truer definition would be creating an experience that has the look, feel and comfort of traditional a TV using TCP/IP to deliver rich media to a television,” says Abhay Dubey, VP & GM, Operations at Verismo.

And that’s exactly what his company does—delivers content with high quality video over current broadband technology directly to any TV without the need of a personal computer using its proprietary ViPTV Platform. ViPTV is a complete end to end system that fully enables content providers and aggregators to market, deliver and monetize their multimedia content to their targeted subscribers.

Verismo will supply set-top box to consumers who can then download content to it over their standard broadband connection or stream video content from websites like Google, YouTube, and Yahoo. Users can order, view, and manage content from the comfort of their living room from their TVs. The STB is based on a video processor with download manager software that accelerates downloads, facilitates recovery from bad connections, and does post-process filtering to optimize video playback quality. Its progressive download feature allows playback during the download, so users need not wait for the entire video to complete downloading before viewing. And just in case the user has videos, photos, and music stored on a PC, the ViPTV STB also contains functionality similar to an Apple iTV box enabling the user to display this content on a TV.

IDC forecasts that there will be over 72 million IPTV subscribers by 2010. Verismo is looking to grab a pie out of this.

Xora
Founded: 1999
Head Quarters: Mountain View, CA
Funding: $11 million
Investors: Dawntreader Ventures
Bangalore operations started in 2003
India head: Pramod Jajoo
Headcount: 175
Website: www.xora.com

If your on-field systems engineers have been shirking work under the guise of being stuck in traffic or held up in customer meetings, Xora's location-based mobile resource management (MRM) solutions could help you get to the truth. Its application will enable you to gauge the exact location of your employees (or even vehicles and equipments); all you must do is provide him with a GPS enabled device, and of course subscribe to the MRM service.
The company claims its product-Xora GPS TimeTrack-is currently saving more than 7000 companies in the transportation, construction, HVAC and service industries thousands of dollars per year by tracking employees' timesheets, jobs and locations.
So what's different about Xora? "Our USP is location; while there are other players in the market offering mobile workforce management solutions, they are not location based," says Pramod Jajoo, Managing Director, Xora India and Vice President of Engineering.
"Though India has a booming mobile growth rate, the current market for our product lies in the U.S. and Australia, with exciting prospects worldwide," says Jajoo. The main factor withholding Xora looking at the India market is the fact that Indian carriers don't have location-enabled devices yet.
Market location notwithstanding, most of Xora's product development happens in its Bangalore facility. "The fact that our software is used by thousands across the globe gives the techies a kick," he says, adding, "at best, we are just scratching the surface even in the U.S. and Australian markets, and the growth prospects draw many techies into our fold."
Many employees in the company have some level of services expertise, keeping in mind that it has opted for the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model to attack the market. A chunk of the support function is also handled by the India center. Jajoo sees the phone becoming a "location tool", and is busy steering the R&D team in keeping its market leadership position in this market.





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