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June - 2011 - issue > Cover Story
Vedicsoft Creating and Delivering Happiness
Hari Anil
Friday, June 3, 2011
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The nightmares of the great recession are all in the past and now the world seems to be a very fair place for technology professionals. The job market is blooming, many companies offering very attractive salary packages for prospective employees which, in some case, even includes with joining bonus. But why are the companies only concentrating on the salary and bonus part? Is money only the factor when it comes to selecting jobs? There is a small, still very vital part called ‘happiness.’ One should be happy with what he is doing. A happy, comfortable employee will surely be twice, if not more, creative and productive than an employee who is just trying to finish his probation period and jump. ‘Creating Happiness and Delivering Happiness,’ a company that has this in their core value, that gives priority to its employees, and has managers who are ready to help their juniors in every ways possible, let it be work related, personal or even financial, seems to be a great place to work in, doesn’t it? It sure does! And that is what Vedicsoft is literally.

Founded in 1999 by Bhat Dittakavi and Venkat Yerubandi and headquartered in Iselin, New Jersey, Vedicsoft is an IT Solutions company specializing in Business Intelligence (BI) and Data Warehousing. At a time when most startups in IT Services were just following the age old business model and focusing on the vertical offerings, Dittakavi and Yerubandi decided that their company should have a core technology that they specialize in and offer it across the verticals they would operate in. As experts in the fields of Business Intelligence their choice was obvious. Today, over a decade later, despite the highs and lows of the industry, the company is cruising on a steady pace with a lot of happy employees and customers as well.

Making businesses intelligent

Having all the data from different departments of the organization in easily understandable format at the right time makes a world of difference. But to get this is not an easy task; different departments in the same company will be using different systems that work on different platforms, languages and databases. To take all these data from all these heterogeneous systems then integrate them and generate a meaningful BI report that can be easily understood is the key. This precisely is the forte of Vedicsoft.

Until a little over a decade ago Extraction Transformation and Loading (ETL) in was done manually through unique data scripting or database programming. In the late 90s there were several companies who were looking for a unique technology, something that could automate ETL tools and BI tools, the demand for these tools were overwhelming. Then, in the early 2000s a new technology came that automated ETL. The founders saw the demand for similar solutions and with their expertise in the same, they decided to take this opportunity and create a niche and thereby enabled them to supplement their products across the industry. “As we are not limited to a particular vertical and is focused on the horizontal instead, a financial recession in any particular vertical won’t affect us very badly. In fact we were not really affected by the recent financial recession,” says Yerubandi.

Delving further into the kind of technology expertise they bring to their clients, the founders exemplify a recent work done for one of their Pharmacy clients. The client, which focused on Delivering on-line adjudication software to the Pharmacy Benefit Management (PBM) industry needed to deploy a reporting portal to deliver real time pharmaceutical sales information to its customers and end users. Specific requirements included developing a solution that allows users to pull up metrics based on various types of pharmaceutical sales related reports through an interface, which was interactive, intuitive, and customizable. Lastly, the source of this portal was a large data warehouse and responses were required to be in real time. The system they already had in place was outsourced to a software company, which managed the portal and developed reports as required on an ad-hoc basis. This process was cumbersome, inflexible and resulted in high overall total cost of ownership (TCO) for the client. Moreover, the system had very limited support for data analysis that was required to extract business decision information. The client approached Vedicsoft to design a system, which would provide flexibility, reliability, high performance and business decision support capabilities.

Vedicsoft’s team was sent there to study and address the issues faced by the client. After listening to and understanding the needs of the clients, they provided a customizable and extensive interface that can process millions of rows of data in real-time and generate reports meeting the performance requirements of the client. Furthermore, a user can interact with a report dynamically to perform decision support system specific analysis. The solution which was built using Java Platform Enterprise Edition and the Struts framework, and the overall architecture was multi layered, consisting of a web tier, a database tier, and a reporting tier. Core database services were being provided by Oracle and a trimmed down, de-normalized PostgreSQL, Informatica, SAP Business Objects instance was extracted out of this core database for fast access in order to increase performance of the reports. The interface supported rich features and content switching and helped the client to bring down their total cost of ownership by almost 50 percent.

This is the age of outsourcing; where companies are outsourcing everything they can possibly outsource in order to decrease the operational cost. It is a known fact that even when outsourcing, companies trust their work with onshore companies rather than offshore companies. While most of Vedicsoft’s counter parts have their entire backend including research and development in India, they stand different with only their administrative work being done out of India. The company believes in being near their customers and deliberately keeps its core operations and R&D on shore, close to where their customers are. Of the 400 employees of the company, 300 are based out of the U.S. headquarters and 100 out of India.

Even though Dittakavi and Yerubandi had over 10 years of experience in Business Intelligence, their lack of entrepreneurial background made everything from management to delivery of services to meeting the expectations of the customers a challenge for them. “Thankfully we were quick learners and we started learning, developing and adapting from day one,” says Dittakavi. During the process of learning it didn’t take them much time to realize the importance of employee development and happiness. “Initially it was just about us; can we do better than each other. But soon we realized it is not about us but about the team and the teamwork,” says Yerubandi. This realization stood as the corner stone for the company in its development so far.

Happy Employees

A complete employee focused company; Vedicsoft is a strong believer of transparency, family values, cultural leadership, and happiness. With all of these values put together, VedicSoft is a company that is transparent towards both its employees and customers, which considers and treats its employees as family, with leaders who can lead the company from the forefront, and gives much importance to its employee’s happiness. The company considers employees as their most prized possession. They know very well the value of employee happiness and its importance in the long run for the company. “The objective is to make the employees happy in what they are willing to do, what they want to do, and align that with what the company wants. By doing this we get the best from our employees,” says Yerubandi. Vedicsoft entertains a culture where any employee’s issue or challenges when brought into the consideration of their seniors will be considered with utmost sensitivity and will be made sure that they get an amicable practical solution in time. A testimony to this is the fact that it was awarded ‘Best Place to Work in New Jersey’ in 2011 by NJBIZ in its Large Employer Category.

The company maintains a culture where the employee employer difference is not there and the whole employee community of the company is like a closely knit family. Employees get personal and professional attention whenever they need it. Apart from this there are informal gatherings, Friday lunches, summer outing and winter gatherings to improve the employee relation. The company utilizes the summer outings and the winter gatherings as an opportunity to get to know their employee’s families better. Vedicsoft gives much emphasis in training and developing their employees. The company always made sure that it brought in experts from the BI field to provide services to their customers and then let these experts bring in other experts. This word-of-mouth attracted a lot of good talent in the niche field to the company. “Our core values along with our technology played a major role in helping us retain talent even in this time of major attrition,” says Dittakavi. “Vedicsoft has a very friendly work environment, whether if its weekly potluck, celebrating birthdays with a delicious cake or providing flexible work hours to employees so they can attend to personal matters makes working with Vedicsoft far more pleasurable,” says Sam Vaghela, an employee in Vedicsoft since 2005. “It is very translucent and has an open door policy. Every day working with Vedicsoft is a unique experience within its self,” says Nisha Jayswal, another employee of Vedicsoft. The list of happy employees does not start and end with Vaghela and Nisha. This culture has helped the company to put a check to their attrition rate, which remains very low compared to the industry standard with many employees who joined the company in its nascent stage still remaining with them. “We are very active in the Small and Medium Enterprise Consortium, in one such meeting some CEOs came to us and told us that, ‘the employees who come out of Vedicsoft are the best, and they are a very hot commodity in the market’. I consider that comment as a compliment to our culture,” says Dittakavi.

Talking about the employee standards at Vedicsoft, a spokes person from Capegemini says, “I am very pleased with the quality of Vedicsoft consultants and their work ethics. Their experience in Data Management has enabled our projects team to successfully deliver the results in time. I like the quality of the subject Matter Experts they provide.” Capgemini is one of Vedicsoft’s many happy customers. The Business Intelligence that Vedicsoft helps its customers achieve itself makes sure that their customers stays happy and the core values of the company comes as an add-on to this. The company is proving that happy employees create happy customers.

Again transparency comes into play, “We are not afraid to say no. When a customer wants us to do something that we cannot deliver we would never say yes and give them a false promise. Sometimes customers ask us to be a part of their project which might outside our specialized arena, so we would tell them we are not experts in that and if you still want us to do it we will. And we will give our 100 percent to it,” says Dittakavi.

Road Ahead

For the past several years the company is seeing a growth rate of 10 – 15 percent per year. Even during the great recession they stood steady and did reasonably well. Even though the company is growing steadily and has a successful business plan they have a different idea of success. “We don’t measure our success in terms of the revenue that we get, rather we measure success through the happiness that is prevailing in our company, the number of leaders we managed to create among us, and how happy our customers are with us. Being a $100 million or $1 billion company cannot be counted as the criteria of success if the employees and customers are not very happy,” says Dittakavi. “Our basic mantra is ‘You take care of the employees and the employees will take care of you’,” adds Yerubandi. Both of them very well know it is all about the people, a fact that most CEOs tend to forget. They are ecstatic about this fact and does everything in their power to keep their people happy, which in turn add on to the success of the company.

Vedicsoft – A great place to work at!

Transparency is one of the core values of the company & it is exercised across the board from the CEO to a Jr. Executive. Management doors are always open to every employee to express/share their concerns. The company also gives every employee the opportunity to grow along with the company. All the employees are part of the Revenue Generating Model which makes Vedicsoft stand unique.

Neelima Janyavula, Senior Manager - Business Development

We have a monthly General Body Meetings; this is a unique approach at Vedicsoft and is definitely a unique experience for the employees. These meetings are very good platforms for the employees to come out with their suggestions, issues, concerns and others, and the management invites suggestions from everybody in these meetings on “how to take the company to next level”.

Vijaykumar Gudapati, Director of Operations - India

Family culture, servant leadership, knowledge sharing at every level of hierarchy, no crucial decisions without prior consultation and discussions with employees, these are among the many factors that keep employees glued to Vedicsoft.

Appu Gaddamanugu, Manager - Business Development

Vedicsoft has a very friendly work environment, be it the weekly potluck, celebrating birthdays with a delicious cake or providing flexible work hours to employees so they can attend to personal matters, all these makes working with Vedicsoft far more pleasurable.

Sam Vaghela, Manager, Business Development

When I had my first placement, I was feeling on top of the world. Being new to industry, the tools provided by the company helped me to perform exemplarily. The organization and people gave me great confidence which in turn molded me to be result oriented. The training provided to me made me understand that the process is all about zeal to learn and constantly update ourselves with trends in IT.

Raju Peetha, Manager - Marketing

Individuals here are given the reins for creativity to enthuse and promote positive change within the organization. The main difference I find with Vedicsoft compared to my previous employer and many of those in the same platform is that everyone has an opportunity to grow, while management takes up the duty to inspire passion in all. Being with Vedicsoft for close to a decade, I feel the company and I have grown together simultaneously.

Sonia Minhas, Vice President- Operations

Vedicsoft – The Origin

Bhat Dittakavi and Venkat Yerubandi were working as consultants in SAP in the late 90s when they saw the opportunity opening up in the Business Intelligence technology sector. Being friends from childhood they had several things in common, of which the lack of fear to take on risk was one. So they decided to utilize this opportunity and start a company. It was a time when many Indians in the U.S. were changing their Indian names to more American names and trying to embrace and adapt the new culture. Bhat Dittakavi and Venkat Yerubandi, on contrary to this trend, decided to establish their Indian identity and hence wanted a name for their company that establishes the ‘Indianism’. With this idea they went back to the roots, which is the Vedas, and decided on a name that revolves around it, ‘Vedicsoft’.

Both Dittakavi and Yerubandi had previously worked as an ERP consultant for fortune companies. They were active in design and implementation of process models for infrastructure, management and operations. Their other credits include highly successful strategic and managerial experience in all the departments including Sales, Marketing, Project outsourcing, BPO, Accounting, Legal, Operations and Human Resources. They have contributed actively for non-profit organizations: Sofkin - a support organization for kids in need, Sankara Eye Foundation – a foundation aiming to eliminate curable blindness in India, North South Foundation – a non-profit organization that conducts scholarship programs and educational contests both in India and the U.S., and VTSeva (Volunteer Together for Service) - a non-profit organization with prime objectives of Care and Education for Blind, Cancer Awareness in Women and Environment Protection for saving Earth.



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