Seth Godin, purple cow padre, ranks “niche” top on his list of sensible marketing. Nay, he even gives it the honor spot in how a business can define itself: by identifying a niche in the consumer’s shopping list and being adept at fulfilling it to the shopper’s delight. Rajaraman “Raju” Iyer, and “Vishi” Viswanath were two of the numerous Indians who flowed in on the ebbing currents of the Y2K waves. As senior project managers at large consulting companies, they were seeing high volumes of IT talent—qualified or otherwise—coming in to the U.S., and were hard put to find true worth in the influx. Nevertheless, the duo was instrumental in building large teams for the projects at various client sites. In a short couple of years, the Y2K fears died down, and the pervasive Internet technologies began eroding the need for human resources to be physically present on projects. “We could see offshore-based services gaining importance, yet there were some issues in it,” says Raju Iyer. Issues were in testing applications and software that were delivered over the Internet, and assuring functional availability. Raju Iyer and Viswanath found Godin’s “niche.”

Testing Capabilities

Intellisys Technology was formed in April of 1998, “through which we hoped to offer intelligent solutions to existing problems,” says Viswanath. “We were not unique in what we were offering, and our aim was to offer them differently.” While the initial efforts included the profitable talent placement business, Raju Iyer and Viswanath reinvested the revenues back into the company to strengthen the specialized “quality testing” vertical they initially went after. The Internet had changed the software landscape forever. Not only that, business-critical applications over the web required very elastic capabilities—users and their demands created variable stress on the application deliveries. An unreliable internet application equates to commercial suicide. And the situation is exacerbated where the e-commerce application is the only link between the customer and the company. “Online customers are your least forgiving audience, and once customers lose confidence in the application—and that loss of confidence happens very quickly—they will simply seek an alternative source of supply,” comments Viswanath. The need for automated testing increased with the complexity of applications and thus the software behind those applications. “Manual testing simply failed,” says Raju Iyer . “Anybody who has been involved with manual testing knows its nature. It is demanding, it is repetitive, it is boring and it becomes increasingly laborious and time-consuming to go back and check every possible effect every time a small change is made.”

Using a slew of automated tools from the market, Intellisys offers clients testing services for a variety of applications. “So what is different? We have developed an ISO certified competence center in Chennai, India that can deliver to client needs globally. We are probably one of the only tools-agnostic service vendor in this space,” observe the duo. Expansion has included venturing out in Australia and Singapore, where the company now offers testing services to local client bases in these countries. “We have developed proprietary tools that allow our testing to negotiate the highest performance capabilities at client applications,” says Raju Iyer .

Embedded Evolution

Intellisys Technology’s foray into the testing market threw up another opportunity at a client site—embedded solutions. The U.S. transit industry relies heavily on automated interfaces to vend tickets, collect fares, and offer services like selling pre-encoded passes, stored-value cards, and so on. Intellisys worked with GFI Genfare, the leading supplier of fare collection solutions for the transit industry, to create seamless, behind-the-machine software and support services for onboard-fareboxes and vending machines across states, including the CTA in Chicago, the Las Vegas RTA, Los Angeles MTA, to mention a few. “Transit Systems are now converging their Rail and bus systems to allow commuters to travel between these systems using one card,” says Viswanath.

Recently, Intellisys has played a major role in the development of WATCH, the Wide Area Transit Clearing House. WATCH is a web-based system that enables tracking inter-agency transactions such as a patron traveling across multiple transit systems using one card. The WATCH system has been designed to be a centralized Database to Collect and Report data/transactions from GFI’s electronic Fareboxes. The project involved Oracle8i Database Server, WebLogic Application Server, Redhat Linux Operating System and browser independent application developed using JSDK 1.3, JSP and Pro*C. The embedded software solutions market is on an expansive growth, embracing verticals like kiosks, even as beleaguered service corporations like airlines and hotels install automated, self-service solutions to reduce employee overheads. Adding to this is the transit market growth, expected to touch a 15 percent rise in 2005.

“Our focus in offering testing and embedded solutions has been extremely well received by our clients,” says Viswanath, where Intellisys has seen growth year-over-year for the last few years.