Siliconindia March 12 Issue

7/28/2019 Siliconindia March 12 Issue

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In My Opinion:Shibulal, Infosys

VC Talk:Sudheer K Kuppam, Intel Capital

In Conversation:DaveBelly,Intersil

Venkatesh Babu, CEO

GrowingalongwithPartners

TiaraConsulting:

BUSINESS & TECHNOLOGY IN THE U.S. & INDIA MARCH - 2012 SILICONINDIA.COM

PUBLISHED SINCE 1997

sil iconindia


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s i l i c o n

Changing Role of CEOBy Shibulal, CEO, Infosys

[Infocus]

[VC Chakra]

[CEO Spotlight]Varun Singh, ScaleArcRagu Bhargava, Global Upside

[VC Talk]Technology & Innovation t o wooIntel Capital

By Sudheer K KuppamManaging Director, Intel Capital

Internet is definitely here to stayBy Amit Patni, Co-founder andChairman, Nirvana Venture Advisors

06[In Conversation]S Raman, Managing DirectorLSI India

[Management]My Role As The CEO Of A StartupBy Paresh K. Patel, Founder & CEOVendScreen

[Entrepreneurs Talk]Lessons from my first venture

By Krishnan Ganesh, Founder & CEOTutorVista

[Business]IT is transforming Utility andPetroleum IndustryBy Juuhi Ahuja, President & CEOWise Men

[Technology]Top 10 2012 ResolutionsBy Benu Aggarwal, FounderMilestone Internet Marketing

[In Conversation]Dave Bell, CEO, Intersil

[Management]Enjoy Your Cricket And Manage YourTeam Successfully Too!By Shali Thilakan,Managing Director- India and South Asia, Cable &Wireless Worldwide

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[Rear View]The ABC of Big DataBy Gaurav Makkar, TeDirector (Office of CT

[Business]SMB Mobility an Oppobe MissedBy Anurag Agrawal, C

[Entrepreneur's corner

Getting Your First CusStartup: 4KTABy Naveen Bisht, BoaChair - Programs, The Entrepreneur (TiE )

[CEO Speak]Experiment and then cbusiness modelBy Rohit Kapoor, PresEXL

[CIO Insights]Business today is all asocialKumar Srinivasan, ChiTechnology Officer, Ba

[SI 20 Profile]

[View Point]Mr. Prime Minster, wewalk the talkBy Pradeep Shankar

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Contents March2012

COVERSTO

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GROWINGALONGWITH PARTNERBy Hari

TIARACONSULT

Venkatesh Babu, CEO

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Editor-in-ChiefPradeep Shankar

Managing EditorsChristoJacob (U.S)

VimaliSwamy (India)

Editorial Staff

BenitaMatildaHariAnil

SumanSVishwas Nair

Sr.Visualizer DipinDasVisualizer Hebert Emmatty

Subscription Manager P Magendran

M

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ng Ad

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SiliconIndia Inc44790 S. Grimmer Blvd

Suite 202,Fremont, CA 94538

T:510.440.8249, F:510.440.8276

siliconindiaMarch 2012,volum e 15-3 (ISSN 1091-9503)

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MARCH - 2012

Editorial

CIO Not a Canary AnymoreI own the technology, you own the content. This is the

statement most CIOs have been making, when they meet their

marketing teams. But now, we are not going to hear this state-ment anymore, thanks to the growing trend of marketing team

acquiring IT capabilities in most enterprises.In the recent years the marketing methods in enterprises

have undergone a profound change due to the shift to the digi-

tal means. The rapidly changing consumer technology world,along with a huge helping hand from the Web, is fundamentally

changing how business gets done. For instance, the cloud is rap-idly becoming the way we deliver and receive virtually every

meaningful service today, from music, TV, applications, news,

phone calls, social media and many more. Moreover CIOs oflarge enterprises have started moving their IT and datacenters

outside their organizations. A combination of forces -- the moveto mobility, the arrival of a new generation of employees and

the BYOD (bring-your-own-device) trend -- is changing theworld of IT with a speed that might have seemed impossible a

few years ago.

In the coming years, with more and more different businessfunctions within the enterprises, companies would need a great

deal of new social, mobile, cloud-based, and customer-centricbusiness solutions. And most of them have realized that the only

way to get it is to have a mature management capability of theirown that understands long term technology, portfolio, project,

and vendor management. This transformation is going to dilute

the responsibilities of CIOs.A CIO trying to grab control of everything will never work

and his role is not going to be a role of canary in the organiza-tions today anymore. They need to understand the customer.

Innovation in the business must be built on a solid partner-ship between the CIO and CMO, with shared goals and metrics,

a common business language, and deep collaboration. If we aresuccessful in practicing it in our enterprises, conquering the

world of consumerization is going to be easy.

Please do share your thoughts with us.

Christo JacobManaging Editor

[email protected]


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The real change, which Ihave started to realize, is

that the buck stops at me.When you gradually transi-

tion, one cannot really make out

sudden changes.

We live in a world of contradic-tions. On one side you have the eco-nomic crisis, unemployment,

European crisis, uncertainty in theU.S., and lack of growth. On the

other side, there are tremendous op-portuniti es. Ther e are many emerg-

ing trends and in our case, it could

be creating opportuni ties arising outof emergence of digital consumer,

growth in emerging markets, newsustainable technologies, or change

in urban demographics. The role ofthe CEO essentially is to see which

of the opportunities to leverage to

create growth for your corporation.When I speak to CEOs of several

global companies, I see a di-chotomy. On one end is the lack of

confidence or clarity. On the otherend is the bunch of opportunities

that they are thinking to leverage.

This is the world in which most ofthe CEOs today operate.

Across the World, be it in devel-oped or developing economies, the

ability of Governments to create so-cial wealth and enhance the quality

of life is diminishing. The only enti-

ties other than Government, whichcan create social wellbeing, are

large corporations. Going forward,Corporates have a much bigger role

to play in the social wellbeing. It is

not just about profits and growth.They (corporations) are the custodi-

ans of most of the social wealth andthere is a responsibility to use it for

social wellbeing.We get impacted by events in the

corporate world more than the

events in the government world.

Given this context, the most criticalrole of the CEO is to drive holistic

performa nce. It i s no t ju st r evenue

and profit. It has different dimen-sions and it is about delivering per-

formance to all stake holders -clients, employees, investors and so-

ciety.

While driving performance,CEOs need to focus on building

trust with all the stakeholders. Weare in an environment where there is

crisis of trust. Any conversationabout corporations, it is all about

lack of transparency, exorbitant

compensation for CEOs, ethics ofrunning business, driving profits in

mindless pursuit. This needs to bechanged. Given the fact that the di-

rection of every corporation is set byits CEO, one of the most important

reasonability with the CEO is to cre-

ate an environment of trust betweenthe corporation and the government,

clients, investors, employees, andthe society.

Pursuing the ultimate mission todeliver performance, CEOs also

need to focus on innovation, strat-

egy and execution. At Infosys, webelieve t hat fiv e percent is s trategy

and 95 percent is execution. Strat-egy and Execution are meant to dif-

ferentiate you in the market, meant

to create business value for yourclients and are meant to create profit

for your corporationhave to be relevant to

tion deviating from wbe very difficult to m

to take it from an idea

CEOs have a vital rocreating a framework

which is relevant to thand relevant for your

vations have to flow irate strategy, its th

specific direction andtion has to follow, th

way you can create v

clients and for yourseTodays corporat

very large responsibistakeholders. We all

extremely challengindemanding and pretty

ronment. We need to

we need to raise the a

need to build trust aninstill confidents on th

s i l i c osilicon i n d i a |6|M a r c h 2 0 1 2

in myopinion

By S.D. ShibulalThe author is CEO, Infosys

S.D. Shibulal

Shibulal took over from Kris Gopalakrishnan as CEO of Infosys on August 21, 2011. Having been

for 3 1 ye ars a nd han dled the ro le of COO f or 5 years , the transi tion t o CEO for h im w as gr ad

than abrupt.

Ci Roe oCEO When I speak

CEOs of severa

companies, I s

chotomy. On ois the lack of c

dence or clarit

the other end

bunch of oppo

ties that they a

thinking to lev


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siliconsilicon i n d i a |8|M a r c h 2 0 1 2

in

Afirm headed by an Indian

American Dr. Birendra Raj

(Dutt) has claimed to haveachieved a breakthrough in Physicswhich will profoundly change the IT

world and cut down ever-rising de-mand for power in computing. The

breakthrough by the entrepreneur Dr.Dutt, an alumni of IIT Kharagpur

and the CEO of APIC Corporation,

in collaboration with a team of re-searchers at his own company; the

Massachusetts Institute of Technol-ogy and Stanford University will re-

sult in computer chips offering muchgreater performance at a small frac-

tion of current power usage.

The core of this breakthrough is

to get the element Germanium to actas a laser, for use as a light sourceon a new generation of mass pro-

duced silicon semiconductor chipsusing light particles or photons, in-

stead of electronics for its functions-i.e. photonic chips.

Dr. Dutt and APIC have teamed

with the College of Nanoscale Sci-ence and Engineering in New York

State (CNSE), with a plan of pro-ducing a fully manufacturable pho-

tonic chip in two years using thistechnology. "Both the scientific

community and industry have been

waiting for a breakthrough like this

and I am extremely proud of myteam. But I am most excited aboutthe practical effect on the world. We

will now be able to use photons formany of the information functions

that electrons have performed on sil-icon computer chips, drastically re-

ducing their power consumption

while supercharging their perform-ance. This could contribute im-

mensely to India's efforts to putmake online services widely avail-

able for the public, and especially inisolated areas," Dr. Dutt said.

Indian American achieves Breakthrough inComputing

Anand Srinivasan, a 15 year old

Indian American student had

the privilege to present hisproject before the U.S President,

Obama. He was among one of the fi-nalists at Google Search Fair, 2011,

who came up with a robotic armwhich is controlled by the users own

brain signals.

Srinivasan created a software pro-gramme which helps in recording the

bodys own electric signals, intens i-

fies them and then sends the signalsto the brain. He explained that, due toexternal noise it was not easy to iden-

tify patterns in the brain. His softwarehelps in getting rid of this noise from

the signal and sending a clear signal

to the brain .Thus, it enables the brain

to control the robotic arm easily.

I wanted to create a bridge be-tween man and machine, Srinivasan

told India-West.Srinivasan grabbed the opportu-

nity to have a discussion withObama on the use of a robotic arm

by wounded Iraq war veterans and

other amputees. This young talentedIndian American now moves on in

creating a robotic leg which can be

worn by people who are afflictedwith osteoporosis or arthritis as wellas amputees.

On the whole there were nineSouth Asian American youngsters

who were among the 55 teens who

participated in the second White

House Science Fair on 7 February.

The young talents were chosen fromthe winners of several science fairs

held across the U.S. last year. A fewof the participants were Shree Bose,

the grand prize winner at last sum-mers Google Science fair; Manasa

Bhatta, a regional finalist in the

Young Epidemiology Scholars com-petition; Miraj Rahemaputra, who de-

veloped an airplane wing which

maximizes fuel efficiency and en-hances performance; Prarthana Dalal,who won first place at the Interna-

tional BioGENEius Challenge for herresearch into potential treatments for

sickle cell disease.

Indian American Teen Anand Presents hisProject Before Obama

si

$ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $

California based desktop virtual-

ization company nivio raised $21 mil-lion from Videocon and AEC Partners.

We are proud that nivio has success-fully delivered 7x returns to some of

our angels in this round. The supportwe have received from our angels overthe last seven years has been unparal-

leled and without their support wewould not have got this far, says Dev

Duggal, Founder and Chief Wizard,nivio. The company was co-founded

in 2004 by Sachin Dev Duggal and

Saurabh Dhoot. The funds would beused for expanding its engineering ef-

forts in its Palo Alto office and to in-corporate the cloud platform across its

operating regions in Europe, MiddleEast, India, and Australia. Fictitious

nivio allows users to access a full

Microsoft OS in the cloud, at anytimeand anyplace, on any tablet, laptop, or

PC, and offers a s eam-

less syncing of files. Itsclients for iOS, An-

droid, Windows, andMac would be avail-

able in the later part ofthe month. Its Ubiquityclient delivers the en-

tire desktop over anyHTML5 browser, apart

from delivering theWindows OS and pro-

ductivity software from nivios cloud

to any device. This eliminates the needfor the users to download anything. Its

App Store lets the users rent their reg-ular desktop software on any screen,

with the nDrive providing upto 10GBof free storage.

We are very excited about this

space; especially as there is a sea-change happening in this industry

and across the board

sumer electronics and

and nivio saw this visiothe Cloud was even

Cloud. We are excitedture opportunities for g

presents to Videocon agic benefit to our exis

and services! says

Dhoot, Chairman, Vid

nivio Expands Engineering Efforts with $21 Million in F

California based

next generation logmanagement and ana-

lytics company, SumoLogic closed $15 mil-

lion in Series B round

of funding. The fundinground was led by Sutter

Hill Ventures in partici-pation from founding

investors GreylockPartners and angel in-

vestor Shlomo Kramer.

We believe that in-vestors see what we see in the mar-

ket: that as enterprises continue to

log data at expo-

nential rates, bothbehind the firewall

and across externalclouds, that data

will need to be har-

nessed efficientlyto deliver action-

able business in-sights, says

Kumar Saurabh,acting CEO and

VP of Analytics,

Sumo Logic.The current round of funding has

brought th e total fund rais ed by the

organization to $20.5 m

Logic plans to use thecelerate its engineerin

market activities. CoApril 2010 by Kumar

Christian Beedgen, Su

the next generation logand analytics company

Big Data for real-time With nearly 30 em

are poised for explosivare aggressively expan

velopment, sales, an

team they anticipawill be more than doub

of 2012.

Sumo Logic Secures $15 Million in Series B Fund

si


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silicon i n d i a |10|M a r c h 2 0 1 2 si l ico ni

ScaleArc is a provider of database in-

frastructure software that simplifies

the way database environments are

deployed and managed, and lowers

costs without any changes to applica-

tions or databases.

CEO Spotlight

Presently we are witnessing

explosive growth in bothstructured and unstruc-

tured data; this is matched by anequally rapid growth in cus-

tomer relational database envi-

ronments. This trend is resultingin a huge SQL scalability prob-

lem. Customers have limitedvisibility into their database

traffic and virtually have noability to respond to traffic in

order to quickly optimize data-

base performance.The database industry in

general is a slow change indus-try, but there has been a massive

upheaval in the last few yearswith the rise of NoSQL which

offers limited features, but bet-

ter performance. Due to contin-ued customer investment in

SQL databases, many vendorsare coming out with solutions

that seek to solve the SQL scal-ability or performance prob-

lems. ScaleArc is solving this

global problem differently thaneveryone else. We do not ask

customers to change their exist-ing architecture; instead we

focus on transparent database

simplification and offer a sim-pler, more efficient approach.

Entrepreneurs have always

faced the same challenges ba-

sically, run an efficient organi-zation, raise funding when the

timing is right, and make sure

your product and team are insynch. It is all about being able

to stay ahead of the curve onproduct development, making

sure that the product is address-

ing a customer pain point, andvalidating your successes in the

market.Now our main challenge is

finding and hiring the right peo-ple. We are i n a very services-

centric market, so finding

people who know how to buildan end-to-end solution is a very

difficult task. For example, weare looking to hire up to 40 new

employees this year, with about60 percent of those at our engi-

neering headquarters in Mum-

bai, and the remainder in theU.S. We are looking to hire en-

gineers with expertise in dataanalytics, data mining and in-

formation extraction, as well assome C, C++ and web develop-

ers who have done network ar-

chitecture development, loadbalancing and built code that

handles high-performance net-works, this is not going to be an

easy task.

Customer reception for ourproducts has been phenomenalboth in India and the U.S. so far,

and we are expecting this to

continue and we are really ex-cited about the future.

EntREpREnEuRs,It Is all abOut stayIngahEad Of thE CuRvE

Varun Singh

si

By Varun Singh, CEO, ScaleArcGlobal Upside is a finance and accounting services specialist with expertisein all aspects of finance, ranging from large-volume transaction processing to

strategic and technical accounting issues. The company offers their clients

scalable, cost-effective resources that execute their finance functions efficiently

and accurately.

CEO Spotlight

Today, companies expand in-

ternationally much earlier intheir life than they used to.

Many more industry verticals areglobal today than ever before. The In-

ternet makes it easy to reach markets

in distant parts of the world, so if acompany has a good product, it is

much easier to sell it all over theworld. However, global sales require

more manpower than traditional localor national sales. To sell in a foreign

country, a company needs people tohandle the regulatory, infrastructure,

and accounting issues and this makes

outsourcing increasingly popular. Fora company to sell in ten or twenty dif-

ferent markets, it is not cost-effective,or, perhaps, even physically possible,

to recruit the local expertise and sup-port local operations in all those mar-

kets at the speed of business. The best

solution is to outsource those needsand services to a specialist firm like

ours, with experience and expertise indoing business in those markets.

Outsourcing is becoming increas-

ingly popular with companies. Wefocus on the finance and accounting

area, but there are others who focuson recruitment services, staff man-

agement, product design and IT. Andof course outsourced manufacturing

is widespread and continuing to grow.

Today, when we think of an industry,we rarely think of one company that

can fulfill all of its customers needs.Even with giant companies like IBM

or Oracle rely on an ecosystem of

companies to provide the full pack-age that makes their technology use-

ful and valuable.The outsourcing business is be-

coming larger and more competitivethan ever before, thus entrepreneurs

need to stay on top of their games. Itused to be all about price in this busi-

ness, but now it is not enough to offer

services at competitive rates. An out-sourcing specialist needs to differen-

tiate itself on other parameters andwe have chosen quality as our key

differentiator. Consistent high qualityis not that easy to achieve or to main-

tain and to make sure we achieve this

every time, we have put systems,processes, and people in the right

places. I take a strong personal inter-est in making sure that our quality

standards are maintained. In the 13

years of our operating history, wehave never lost a client because of

quality issues, and I am determined tomaintain that track record. We oper-

ate in more than 30 countries now andin every single one of these markets,

we also provide persservice. This has been

ful for us. With new cliefinding that they have

perience with one of ou

where the price offer mattractive but the entir

and experience very fruwould go wrong. Whe

eventually surfaced afixed, and when they a

happened, they foundanswers to their questi

highly personal servicof our customers, and vresponsive service. O

tomers experience the way of doing business

of loyalty.

glObal ExpansIOnIs a thE ORdER Of thE day

Ragu Bhargava

si

By Ragu Bhargava, CEO, Global Upside, Inc.


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silicon i n d i a |12|M a r c h 2 0 1 2

TIARA CONSULTINGGROWINGALONG

WITHPARTNERS

A

leading U.S. coffee manu-facturer F. Gavia&Sons,

headquartered in Vernon,California, faced chal-

lenges in implementing an

integrated technology solu-

tion to enable excellence in their Trade Pro-motion Management. Being a coffeemanufacturer, they had limited technical

bandwidth to pull this off on their own andbeing a SMB they need to keep a tab on their

budget and could not afford t o hire a bigcompany to do this job for them. This is not

just the case of one company, this is the

trauma many small and medium businessesface in this changed world. In todays cut-

throat business environment any help a com-pany can get in terms of business

intelligence, trade promotion managementsolutions, customer relationship management

or enterprise resource planning will be a

blessing for their business. SMBs spend justover $2.9 billion in Business Intelligence

alone in 2011, an enormous percentage oftheir total budget. All of the giant players

have the ways and the means to spend mam-moth amounts on technologies but what

about companies like Gavia the small

and medium players, which do not have tens

of thousands of dollars to treat themselveswith?

Gavia was looking for a company whocan help them. That is when they stumbled

across Tiara Consulting. Tiara took on the

project without any delay and it marked the

beginning of a fruitful, mutually beneficialpartnership.Initially the company stepped-in to assist

Gavia with ERP SME (Subject Matter Ex-pertise) in Oracle E-Business Suite ( EBS).

Through its proactive approach in deliveringcustomer value, Tiara expanded its support

to the business team in advising changes to

business processes for adopting new tech-nology solution and helped in implementing

the integrated solution.Today Tiara is in-volved in advising solutions for handling

complex brand management and trade pro-motion business scenarios and also, enabling

excellence in their CRM systems for Gav-

ia.The integrity of Tiara team and theirstrong knowledge and expertise has helped

Gavia to achieve impeccable results in theimplementation of our trade promotion soft-

ware, says Marcia Ramos, Project Managerfor Trade Promotion, Gavia.

Started in 2006 by V.A Venkatesh Babu,

Tiara Consulting is a Global IT Consulting Venkat

COVER STORY

QUICK FACTS

Founder : Venkatesh Babu, CEO

Founded : 2006Headquartered : San Ramon, CAOther Offices : Chennai, India & Singapore

Employees : 75Customers : 55

Website : www.tiaraconsulting.com

By Hari Anil


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silicon i n d i a |14|M a r c h 2 0 1 2 sil i coni n

firm that specializes in delivering proj-ect based IT solutions and services in

business intelligence (BI), CRM, ERP,business applications, quality engi-

neering and emerging technologies.The company specializes in bridging

the gap between business and technol-

ogy through its ability to correctly un-derstand the business processes and

needs of their customers, and offeringthe correct solutions using BI, CRM,ERP and web technologies. The best

part for SMBs is that the company isoffering solutions tailor made for

them, to fit their needs and constraints.We are very clear on how we want to

reach out to the customers and how we

want to grow. Being a small startup,right now we cannot go ahead and

market our products to Fortune 100customers, doing that will be like try-

ing to pull a mountain using a smallrope. We are concentrating on smaller

players who we can grow along with,says V.A.Venkatesh Babu, Founder,

President & CEO, Tiara Consulting.

The BeginningWhen the company started back in2006 it started as an ERP subject mat-

ter expertise provider. The manage-ment of Tiara knew the importance of

trust in a companys customer rela-tionship; they also knew that this trust

can only be built by offering impecca-ble services and the company concen-

trated on this. Time proved this to bethe right strategy and approach.

By providing very high quality

services the company managed tobuild the trust factor among its cus-

tomers and that helped them to attaingrowth that could not be attained oth-erwise. The trust factor made their

customers to start asking them to ven-ture into more and more services.

When the demand came, we realizedwe have the potential to help our

clients beyond ERP, says Babu. The

company has come a long way sincethat, and now it is nothing short of a

premium offshore partner for productengineering, for many of its clients.

From its inception onwards Tiaraflaunts a partnership based approach.

This has helped the company so far inits journey. For example, it started as a

consulting service provider for Perva-

sive Software, a leading data integra-tion company based in Austin, Texas.

Tiara earned the trust through its serv-ice excellence and process optimiza-

tion, and transformed the businessrelationship into a long lasting part-

nership. Within the past three years, ithas become one of Pervasives pre-

mium partners in several areas such asproduct engineering, quality engineer-

ing, product implementation and serv-ice support. All the services done for

Pervasive and its customers are exe-

cuted 100 percent from Tiaras off-shore development center in Chennai

and therebybringing cost ef-

fectiveness into

the businessequation. As atrusted partner,

Pervasive relies

on Tiara to de-velop new con-

nectors andupgrades to exist-

ing ones on theirp r o p r i e t a r y

framework. Presently Tiara is also the

sole distributor and market develop-ment partner of Pervasive in India and

helped Pervasive data integrationproducts reach out and sell to some of

the leading companies in the market.These customers include some of the

large multinational banks and few ofthe giant BPO players in India.Tiaras strength in delivering high

quality services with agility using aglobal / offshore model has helped to

expand our business partnership intodifferent areas, says Lance Speck, VP

and GM of Integration, Pervasive

Software.Cloud computing has opened up a

sea of opportunities to companieswanting to embrace latest technolo-

gies. Arguably, cloud gave birth toSaaS, pay-as-you-go, and PaaS mod-

els and this has made many technolo-gies affordable to the SMBs. But the

issue is that, since the development

and growth of cloud happened veryfast, there are only a very limited num-

ber of players in this space. Yet, Tiarahas already established its presence

over the cloud and today the companyis providing both on-premise and

cloud based integration solutions andcloud based CRM solutions using

Salesforce.com, Oracle CRMOD, Net-Suite and MS Dynamics. By provid-

ing services on the cloud the companyis not just standing out among its com-

petition but also is providing its cus-

tomers all the advantages andflexibility that comes along with

cloud.

The Tiara Advantages

In the past five years, the company hasstrengthened its capabilities by forging

partnership with global leaders such as

Pervasive Software, Oracle, Right-

Now, Salesforce, Microsoft, IBM,TALLY Solutions and grown its busi-

ness multi-fold across diversified busi-ness segments and geographies with

its corporateheadquarters in

San Ramon, Cali-

fornia. It hasoffshore develop-

ment center inC h e n n a i ,

India,and busi-ness operations

spread acrossU.S., UK, UAE(Dubai), Singa-

pore and India.The scarcity

of IT solution providers is severelyfaced by SMBs throughout the world,

yet it is more severe in growing

economies like India. Indian SMBsstruggle as not many companies pro-

vide services to the small players, allthe providers are targeting MNCs that

operate within the nation. Again, Tiarais a boon for them. The companys

main concentration is on the domesticmarket too. The services that it pro-

vides come with pay-as-you-go model

and so are very affordable for the SMBplayers. We understand the issues

faced by the small and medium busi-nesses in the country, we are commit-

ted to bringing value back to thecountry and are very focused on this,

says Babu.The company also provides its cus-

tomers with training in proprietaryproducts. This is not a very common

service that many companies provideto their clients. The advantage that

Tiara is providing to its clients by

doing this is unparallel. This also ce-

ments the already strong bond andtrust between the company and its

partners. The company believes inbuilding strong relationships with its

customers so as to develop long term

partnerships with them. It provides ut-most transparency in its conduct and

its global delivery model comes with acost advantage.

Since inception, Tiara has been fo-cusing on serving the booming IT

needs in India. Towardpany formed a long-te

with TALLY Solutions TALLY Sales, Service

Partner. Within one yenership, it won more th

customers in India. It w

time that the automobIndia mandated that a

from vendors have to bcertified. Most of the

using Tally, which did

barcode solution.The vcomply with the manlooking for companies

vide this service for the

as the sure winner in thiis the first Indian compa

Tally bar code. The comneed early on when o

tomers came and asked

its prominent Tally devguage expertise the c

ahead, did the research it so that all of its custo

efit. We have also bui

ment for Tally. Now ouraccess Tally from any w

This is the biggest drivpand Tally project in I

have a mobile applicatsays Babu.

Tiara Account Team for Pervasive:

Venkatesh Babu, CEO and

Lakshmi Kalyani P. Venkatesan,Tiara

Director,Strategic Accounts and Account

Executive for Pervasive, presenting on

Integration Excellence at Pervasive

Europe Summit, London.

Lance Speck, VP and GM, Pervasive

Software, and Venkatesh Babu, CEO,

Tiara Consulting at Pervasive Integration

World Europe Summit at London.

Tiara CEO at Gavia headquarters with

Fernando Herrera, Brand Director,

Gavia and Marcia Ramos, Gavia

Project Manager, Trade Promotion

Management.

The company has

strengthened its capabilities

by forging partnership withglobal leaders such as

Pervasive Software, Oracle,

RightNow, Salesforce, Mi-

crosoft, IBM, TALLY Solutions

Tiara CEO with

Gavia CRM Team:

Lisette Gavia Lopez (far

Director, Gavia, & Miche

(middle), Gavia CRM Pr


9/25


Word of mouth publicity comes as

a byproduct of good customer rela-tions and it has worked miracles for

the company in its run. Many a times,its customers have introduced or re-

ferred the company to some of its part-ners who in time became the

companys clients. The main advan-tage for word of mouth publicity is

that a level of trust is inherited by the

new customer from the existing cus-tomer.

Another key differentiation thatthe company provides to SMBs

abroad is the onsite offshore model.Even though they want the cost arbi-

trage that comes with offshore part-

nership, most of the SMBs tend not totrust their work with players who do

not have an onshore presence. Withoffices in California, Singapore, and

India, the company has managed totake away this fear from many of its

clients. Customers can directly be in

touch with Tiaras office in theircountry and still get the benefits of

off-shoring. This provides the clientswith a sense of security. It delivers its

services across the world in a globaloffshore delivery model with major-

ity portion of the work delivered by

our offshore delivery team located inChennai, India. The company is also

establishing their presence in the UKmarket thus enabling the trust factor

in the Europe as well. More than that,it offers offshore model for projects

as short as two weeks. Due to this, the

customers can save up to 70 percentof the cost even for smaller projects.

Not many players in the industry pro-

vide this.

FutureThe company has been growing atmajor league pace since its inception

and it is expected to continue in thefuture. It considers its dynamic, self-

motivated group of professionals asits backbone and the management

makes sure that this team stays happy

and motivated. In order to ensure this,the top management spends a lot of

time with the employees, understand-ing their needs, solving their issues

and helping them in any aspect theymight need help in. The organization

flaunts a flat hierarchical culture,

where an employee does not have tojump through the hierarchical loops to

reach the senior management. An em-

ployee who wantsto talk to the senior

management can goahead and do this in

person or overemail or phone.

This makes our

employees feelcomfortable and

valued. They knowthat they are recog-

nized as an integral part of the com-

pany and feel appreciated for thevalue that they are providing to thecompany, says Babu.

The company believes in trans-

parency and has made it a policy toreach out to the employees with the

information of companys growth. Asthe CEO, Babu sends a bimonthly up-

date regarding the companys growthand any other key updates to the em-

ployees. The management believes

that this helps to keep the employeesmotivated and informed. Apart from

competitive remuneration packagesand great work environment, the com-

pany also provides its employeesmaximum opportunity to stay current

and updated with the latest develop-ment in the industry. This is an areaI am focusing much on. I always

make sure that our employees stay up-dated and get proper training in all the

new and relevant technologies in theindustry. We organize training ses-

sions for our employees on a regular

basis, says Babu. All these factorshave contributed in building the

highly qualified, tightly knit talentpool that the company has today.

Tiara seems to have big plans forthe future. The company has grown in

an exponential pace so far and themanagement team is expecting this

growth to continue in the future. Our

aim is to double our revenue everyyear. In fact, our budget this year is

two and a half times our budget lastyear, says Babu. The company also

has plans to establish offices in Ban-galore and Delhi this year.

Tiara India Delivery Team at ChennaiTiara Management Team at India

(From Left): R. Vengadesh, General

Manager, Asia Pacific and A.T.NaveenPrabhu, Director, Technology Solutions.

We understand the issues

faced by the small and

medium businesses in the

country, we are committed

to bringing value back to

the country and are very

focused on this

si


10/25


11/25

silicon i n


Imagine trying to put together a1000-piece jigsaw puzzle without

having seen the picture first. How

difficult would that be? For most peo-ple, putting together the puzzle with

the picture to compare to would bevery challenging in itself and it would

be virtually impossible without any-thing to compare against.

Building a company from the

ground-up is like putting together ajigsaw puzzle. The CEO must have a

vision for the company and mustclearly be able to visualize what the

puzzle looks like. The CEO mustalso be able to articulate that vision be-

cause he or she will rely on other peo-ple to move the pieces into place. The

CEO must be able to live in a reality

where the puzzle is complete, eventhough pieces will not be in place yet.

However, he or she has the confidencethat all the pieces are there, and it is

only a matter of time in finding theright piece for each part of the picture.

At the highest level, I view my role

as the CEO is to inspire the vision and

connect the people with resources toexecute that vision. The fundamentalrole is about having a vision and then

getting resources the time, tools,money and so on to the right people

who can execute the vision.

A day does not pass where I do notwork or think about this central part of

my role as CEO. I need to be able to

not only anticipate where the industryis headed and what the customers will

seek, but also how the company willexist in that marketplace.

Often times, I must challenge theassumptions that are widely held by

others in the industry as well as oth-

ers working for the company. In astart-up that is chartering new terri-

tory, it is imperative to understand thatthe vision or the r eality we seek does

not exist yet. This is almost a paradoxfor the CEO he or she must be able

to see the vision (the completed jigsawpuzzle) and understand it without hav-

ing the benefit of ever having seen it.

The people moving the pieces haventseen the puzzle either, but the CEO

must lead as if he has seen it.Hence, this is the challenge of

being a CEO of a start-up.The successful CEO can envision

the future reality and create it at the

same time. This takes a remarkable

skill that only a small percentage ofthe CEOs actually possess. And theones that do will create highly suc-

cessful enterprises. This is what I, aswell as CEOs of most startups, aspire

to do.

My ROlE as thE CEO Of a

staRtup

In Conversation

si

By Paresh K. Patel, Founder & CEO of VendScreen

Paresh K. Patel is the Founder & CEO of VendScreen, which produces An-droid-based touchscreen for vending machines. Founded in 2011, by Pateland Glenn Butler, VendScreen personalizes the vending experience by de-livering the nutrition data and advertising to displays mounted on vendingmachines. The company had recently secured $12 million in funding.

Management

Whats the biggest driver for LSI

today?

LSI, as you know focuses on storage and

networking market. In these two mar-kets, we are the most trusted provider of

technologies and are leading the way forcompanies. The key word here is trust.

When we deliver our products to lead-ing OEMs, we have to make sure the de-

livery is on time, with the highest levels

of quality. The products that we deliverhave a life of 7 to 10 years. It takes time

for trust to be established within yourcustomers and this happens when make

sure that we not only enhance the fea-tures of a product, but also ensure relia-

bility and quality. Talking about trends,

we are now focusing on the wireless in-frastructure, because the new industries

are very dynamic with newer technolo-gies deployed. So, in terms of chal-

lenges, I would say our focus has

always been higher complexity, lowerpower, and better features from a prod-uct point of view. In terms of product

behavior, we look at products being

early to market and those with highquality and reliability

How is India as a market today, for

LSI?

India is definitely a growth area.

There is a lot of demand for data and

storage, which is fueling a tremen-dous amount of growth. The semi-

conductor association is projectingthat by 2020 the semi-con industry

alone will be worth $40 billion. So, itsure is a huge market and there is a

big consumption that is projected.

Hence, the more India and Chinagrow, the more growth we see. This

in turn is a positive sign for us.

What are the technology trends you

are seeing today? How is LSI posi-tioned there?

We supply leading technology to our

customers who are participating in

these trends in a big way. For exam-ple, if we look at the infrastructure of

cloud computing and the deploymentof these large data centers and also the

public and private cloud, there is atremendous amount of storage and

networking infrastructure that goes

into that. And that exactly is whereLSIs focus is on. We always look at

how we can differentiate the productsand solutions here in LSI.

What are the interesting activities

that are happening in R&D centerhere?

When we talk about semi-con industry

we are not just talking about siliconchips alone, but there are other aspects

also involved in it. There is a signifi-

cant amount of firmware and multiple

players of software that goes with it.When comparing these solutions we

develop today, as to what was beingdone earlier, there is a huge amount of

complexity that is seen. And this bringschallenges in terms of design, the abil-

ity to comprehend, verification, vali-

dation, and making sure it is doingwhat it is supposed to do. And defi-

nitely LSI is engaged in doing such

leading edge product developments. Todesign a product that successfully andreliably runs for many years, are the

engineering challenges we see in LSI.

The innovative spirit continues tobe nurtured in India. One of the unique

things that we are doing in LSI is apatent initiative across all the teams in

India. Here we lay continuous empha-sis on why it is important to disclose

patents, which helps companies tomaintain the product leadership and

how it helps the overall growth of the

company. So, we need great talents, asgreat talents develop great products. It

feels great to be surrounded by lot ofsmart people at LSI, where we get to

learn a lot from them. With technologybecoming more and more complex, the

ability to grasp the things is going to be

determined by the technological ex-changes we make. Thats what we

would like to experience in LSI.

lEadIng thE way In

nEtwORkIng andstORagE spaCE

si

LSI Corporation (NYSE: LSI) is anelectronics company based in Mil-

pitas, California that designs semi-conductors and softwares thataccelerate storage and networkingin datacenters and mobile net-works.Santhanakrishnan Raman,

MD, LSI India R&D shares histhoughts on the opportunities he isbetting on.

Santhanakrishnan Raman


12/25

silicon i nsilicon i n d i a |22|M a r c h 2 0 1 2

First stint as an Entrepreneur

My first venture was IT&T. During

the initial years of my career in thehardware industry, I came across

customers who faced issues withthe maintenance of their computer.

This gave me the idea to start

IT&T. I think my biggest learningfrom this was managing the cash

flow successfully. The companysinception happened during a period

when neither venture capital nor

angel funding was popular, neitherwas the services industry (whichwas our business model). It was

also a period when only manufac-

turing businesses were mushroom-ing and their requirements were

different from the services sector.At that point we did not think about

monetization or raising money. Thewhole focus was on paying em-

ployee salar ies at the end of the

month. IT&T taught me that for anentrepreneur it is not about

EBIDTA (Earnings Before Interest,Depreciation, Tax and Amortiza-

tion), EPS (Earnings Per Share), orprofit margins , b ut a bout having a

positi ve cas h flo w. If at t he end ofthe month, I have cash to pay allmy expenses, then I have a suc-

cessful business; if I delay salariesor vendor payments, then it is an

unsuccessful business.

What I Learnt

My first venture taught me that be-sides managing cash flows success-

fully, one also needs to select theright co-founders and partners. At

IT&T, I had five partners with dif-ferent backgrounds. But over time,

we had to buy the shares of a cou-ple of partn ers, as there were dif-

ferences. That taught me the need

to choose partners carefully andalso to build a strong team, right at

the beginning. In my subsequentventures, I took care in selecting

the co-founders and partners, and itwas a great experience as I part-

nered with the right pized that it is importa

founders with diversecan meaningfully ch

other, rather than aagreement.

I also learnt the i

having a sound businUsually when you st

you always start withexcitement. But it is e

tant to build a busine

objective. Without thais difficult to exit, sctize any business. I d

in my first venture,

subsequent ventures, on the goal and we p

wards it.

Turning the Constr

vantages

When you are an entr

learn very fast aboutexpected situations.

days, in the initial moscouting for our first c

tomer. As a startup, counwilling shift the

maintenance from names like Wipro and company. One of th

companies wanted tofice as a part of their e

due diligence. Duringfact that we have jus

office and one teleph

up. But we positionethat we offer just si

contact, one phone ntheir problems, will n

call on hold (there wfor call holding), and

transfer their calls (thtercom system to tra

to). This became a m

tiator, since none of thpanies could promis e

and we won the contrlight hearted way,

how you can turn yoto your advantage.si

Entrepreneurs Talk

Krishnan Ganesh, the Founder and CEO of Tu-

torVista, and the CEO of SMARTHINKING,

shares his experiences and the lessons he learnt from

his first venture.TutorVista is an online tutoring

company which was founded in 2005. Both these

companies are part of the Pearson Group

(NYSE:PSO, UK: PSON), a global leader in educa-

tion, teacher training, education technology and

school solutions.

It provides online tutoring at affordable prices,

and has a tutor base of over 2,000 teachers across

India, U.S., UK, Australia, China, and South East

Asia. Apart from online tutoring, it also provides

Test Prep Help, Homework help, Supplemental Tu-

toring, and gives assistance to the students before

their tests and exams.

Prior to founding TutorVista, Ganesh had

founded IT&T (acquired by iGate) and Cus-

tomerAsset (acquired by ICICI and now publicly

listed in India as FirstSource Solutions). He was

also Chairman, investor and advisor in the Data An-

alytics BPO firm Marketics till March 2007, when

the company was acquired by the NYSE listed WNS

for $63 million.

Apart from founding and succ essfully growing

the four ventures, Ganesh has worked as the CEO

of Wipro/Bharti British Telecom - a British TelecomJV in India, and held senior management position

in HCL Ltd. In a candid chat with siliconindia,

Ganesh shares his experiences and the lessons

learnt from his first venture.

leo rom

M fir vere

Krishnan Ganesh

It is important tohave co-founderswith diverse skillsets who can

meaningfully chal-lenge each other,rather than alwaysbeing agreement.


13/25

silicon i n d i a |24|M a r c h 2 0 1 2 s il i coni n

Smart Grid

Utility industry is seeing a transformation like no other.

Over the last 100 years very little has changed in the waypower is distributed and consumed. The Power distribution

grid is in desperate need of upgrades to meet the currentdemands and maintain its reliability. Since grid infrastruc-

ture is difficult to change, complex to maintain and up-

grades takes a very long time, significant investments needto be made to make the grid scalable for next 100 years.

With the advent of consumer driven generation, these de-vices need to be plugged into the grid and consumers can

play the role of generators. Power generated needs to bemeasured for billing and settlement purposes, a significant

change compared to current processes.

Utility industry, often compared to telecom industry hasnot evolved and does not leverage the technology to im-

prove the service and lower its costs to operate. The differ-ence is in the rate of transformation led by adoption of the

technologies. Telecom industry deregulated long time agoand the competition in the market led to faster adoption of

the newer technologies. The Utility industry on the other

hand operated as regional monopoly, utility companieswere paid a fixed percentage of the cost as margin and as

such didnt have any incentive in adopting new technolo-gies in order to reduce cost and improve customer satis-

faction.

Whats next?

Newer technologies will be adopted and the pace of change

will be unprecedented. Some of the major reasons for thisrate are the aging grid infrastructure and major power out-

ages resulting in billions in losses and interrupting the econ-omy. This change impacts more than just utility company,

it will impact generation, wholesale and trading, retail andmost of all the consumers. Similar to the wireless industry

transformation with the advent of iPhone and other smartdevices, Smart grid initiatives will change the Utility in-

dustry and power consumption. Consumers want to meas-

ure and monitor what they purchase. They want choicesand mobility and save money at the same time.

Current processes for utility company and systems will

be completely outdated. Existing busi-ness processes and systems will present

massive inertia impacting their ability tochange in a timely fashion. Major in-

vestments need to be made to upgradethe entire grid if consumers need unin-

terrupted power supply. These initiatives

are termed has Smart Grid Initiatives. Atypical SmartGrid deployment usually

incorporates multiple functionalitiesranging from network management, out-

age management, SCADA operations

and a host of other functionalities. An-other core component in SmartGrid de-ployments is AMI/Smart Meters. These

meters are usually installed at the cus-

tomer premise (both industrial and com-mercial) and participate in a 2-way

communication with the utility company.These smart meters emit huge amounts

of critical information on a very frequentbasis that can be used in creating trouble

orders at much faster rate compared to

traditional manual entry/IVR.A leading electric utility distribution

company, planning to replace existinglegacy applications to support the Smart

Grid initiative and is working with WiseMen Solutions. The project termed as

Advanced Distribution ManagementSystem (ADMS) encompasses a wide-range of applications that need to ex-

change information in an effectivemanner. This system is at the heart of

Smart grid technology and has bi-direc-tional information exchange dependency.

The goal of the project is to devise an in-

tegration architecture that is standards-based, scalable, and agile in adapting to

future changes. This approach deliversimmediate business benefits.

Markets for Utility Smart grid SOAand software integration infrastructure

which were at $169 million in 2008 areanticipated to reach $1.7 billion by 2015

(Winter Green Research). Utility Enter-

prise IT Spending for Smart Grid is fore-casted to reach $8.2 Billion by 2015,

according to New GTM Research Re-port. Wise Men believes there is a signif-

icant talent shortage in this arena and isgearing up for ground up growth.

Petroleum Industry Data Exchange

(PIDX)

American Petroleum Institutes com-

mittee on global electronic businessstandards in the oil and gas industry

recommends the PIDX format for fa-cilitation of electronic commerce.

PIDXs vision is to achieve petroleumindustry and enterprise-wide integra-

tion of business processes through

seamless electronic business communi-cation. PIDXs mission is to influence

the architecture and facilitate imple-mentation of effective standards and

processes for electronic business com-munications within the petroleum in-

dustry community. PIDX leverages the

inherent value in existing EDI stan-dards as well as actively pursue the

benefits of emerging e-Business tech-nologies. A leading oil field servicing

company has engaged Wise Men Solu-tions to implement PIDXs vision of

achieving petroleum industry and en-

terprise-wide integration of businessprocesses through seamless electronic

business communicatiproject was to impleme

voicing out of the clientsuch as an ERP system

which can readily suppocustomers, and GeoMar

zations global operatio

the foundation for B2Band meeting point for th

ties in the field, such as eators, IT developers, ex

of electronic invoicing

these solutions companreduce their days sale(DSO) and generate m

their business with the

ceivables. An added atomating leads to labor

Whats next?

PIDX technologies wi

adopted at ERP level budevise level and the pace

be unprecedented. Som

reasons for this is the raof devices at user level

focus on UI. This changthan just Oil Company

Wholesale, Trading andMarkets for PIDX

gration infrastructure haa $100+ billion annual ement marketplace. PIDX

reengineered entire busand operations for gre

and profitability (PIDX committee). Wise Men

is a significant talent s

arena and is gearing upgrowth.

A majority of the Wtele in Oil & Gas, Energ

dustries have SAP, OracIT Systems, Wise Men

gration of above cutting gies with the core IT sys

high performance comp

analytics and MobilityMen has also been activ

community work in Hohas been recognized by

ing vendor who helpedefforts of gulf coast oil s

Business

Wise Men, based out of Houston TX, is a leadingIT Solutions firm focusing on industry verticalssuch as Energy & Utility and Oil& Gas sector.An award winning Women and Minority ownedbusiness, Wise Men has recognized by Inc 5000as one of the fastest growing companies in theUS and one of the top 50 locally. Wise Men isowned by Juuhi Ahuja and has two divisions;Wise Men Consultants and Wise Men Solutions.Wise Men Solutions division is headed by

Deepak Chandwani who is a 20 year technol-

ogy industry veteran and focuses as extensiveexperience in developing IT Solutions verticals.Wise Men helps its customers implement cuttingedge technologies such as Smart Grid Initiativesand PIDX eInvoicing, and ERP solutions.

It i rormiutIlIty and pEtROlEuM IndustRy

Juuhi Ahuja

By Juuhi Ahuja, President and CEO, Wise Men

With the increasingpenetration of smartphones,mobile broad band networksand innovative 'connecteddevices', mobile will play a fargreater role in healthcare inboth developed anddeveloping countries in thefuture. The provision ofpervasive mHealth services andapplications worldwide could

provide mobile operators withrevenues worth approximately$11.5 billion by 2017.

Courtesy: GSMA


14/25

s i l i c o ni nsilicon i n d i a |26|M a r c h 2 0 1 2

By Benu Aggarwal, Founder, Milestone Internet Marketing, Inc.

Technology

In 2011 search engines made signifi-cant changes to the algorithms to im-

prove the quality o f search results forthe consumers. As an online marketer,

staying on top of all the latest changescan be a daunting task. The key to stay-

ing relevant is creating content across all

channels that your customers value. Theten tips below give a strategic path to en-

suring that your marketing efforts havethe best possible ROI in 2012.

1. Site/Content Freshness, Relevancy

After several algorithm updates in 2011

especially Googles Panda updates andseveral Bing updates search engines

have confirmed that they give a higherrelevancy to websites with fresh content.

Site Freshness Score

Any webpage is given a freshness score

based on when search engines first in-dexed it. This score can boost the content

for certain search queries and declines as

the content ages. The frequency andamount of content changes makes a big

impact on the score.

Which type of content makes a differ-

ence?

Bottom-line: sites that change more often

by adding val uable, time sensitive infor-

mation have a big impact. News sitestend to rank high due to their fresh and

timely content. Link from a site, whichhas a high freshness score, is more valu-

able than from a static site. A sites fresh-ness score can be influenced by a new

page, post or by addi ng news wor thy in-

formation and not by just adding/chang-ing keywords on the page.

What does this mean for businesses?

Make sure your site platform is built to

scale, and offers features such as blog,

polling feature, contest, and revi ews foruser engagement so that you can keep the

content of your site fresh.

2. Focus on Improving User Experi-

ence site Usability Enhancement List

Although technical SEO elements such

as on-page tags, headers and many moreare very important, ultimately it is the

users experience with the site that mat-ters. Positive user experience is now a

part of se arch engines rank ing factor.

Site Usability Enhancement List

Site owners should pay special attention

to site / page bounce rate, site downloadspeed, browser and platform compatibil-

ity, site crawl rate, deployment of richsnippets and semantic tags on the site and

site analytics to understand user behav-ior with their site. Check to see if your

site is programmed in HTML5. Use toolssuch as Page Speed by Google and Yslow

by Yahoo! to check cruci al site perform-

ance metrics. It is a great idea to put to-gether a handy list of site improvements.

Site improvement is not a one-timeevent; it should be checked and adjusted

almost on a monthly basis.

3. Using Mobile Effectively.

The mobile market is growing signifi-cantly. According to eMarketer, US mo-

bile commerce sales (inclu ding travel )increased 91.4 percent to reach $6.7 bil-

lion. The number of mobile buyers willnearly triple by 2015. Over 40 million

access social networks daily via mobile,

and eventually there may be more mobileweb users than PC users by 2015.

Most of the mobile searches are localand last minute in nature. People are

using mobile platform to check-in, for

social sharing, multimedia sharing

such as photos, songs etc. Voicesearch engines such as Apples Siri

are helping in increasing mobilesearch engines queries.

Check to see if you are promoting

effectively on Mobile platform

Businesses should start paying seri-

ous attention towards mobile. Theycan incentivize their customers by

offering mobile specific coupons,check in specials, run paid ads for

mobile-specific campaigns etc.There are several reasons a businessshould create a search friendly mo-

bile site in 2012 if they have notdone it yet. If you have a mobile

site, chances are your site will showup for queries coming from mobile

devices and the conversion from a

mobile site will be better by offer-ing customers precise content such

as click to call, maps, and ease ofbooking off ers right away.

4. Leveraging hyper local Chan-

nels

With the growth of mobile phones,geosocial and hyperlocal sites have

become lucrati ve channels to con-nect with a local target audience.

Businesses should leverage some ofthe most popular UGC/hyperlocal

channels such as: Yelp, Google+,Foursquare, Facebook, etc. by offer-

ing mobile check-ins, offers and

tips. Businesses can associate use ofan offer with physical locations.

Customers can use Google+ busi-ness profiles or Yelp or any other

profi le t o ch eck i n an d re deem of-fers on mobile devices. Customers

can choose to share check-ins pub-

lically, keep it private or share itwith their circle of friends.

5. Maintain a Handy List of Most

Valuable Local Citations/Links

and Perform UNAP Audit

Local citation and links are still im-

portant r anking fact ors. Quant ity ofcitations is considered the fourth

most important SEO factor for local

search ranking. Businesses shouldsecure local citations, listings, and

links regularly and establish the cor-rect URL, Name, Address, and

Phone Number (UNAP). Users often

find multiple listings for same loca-tion on map results due to one busi-

ness having different URLs orphone numbers . Ensuri ng UNAP

consistency greatly helps in rankinghigh in local search results.

6. Cross Channel Optimization

We are seeing higher ROI for busi-

nesses who diversify their promo-tion efforts across other search

channels. Check your webmasterlogs for keywords driving the most

traffic and optimize other channels

such as local, paid, and social forthose keywords. Content calendars

can be used to plan a strategy fordifferent channels.

7. Social Media Marketing Plan

Targeted and Planned Approach

Social media is now an integral partof search. Search engines have con-

firmed using social signal as part oftheir ranking algorithm. We strongly

recommend developing an inte-grated social media marketing plan

which should include informationon: which target channels and why;

what goals you are trying to

achieve; your target audience; andthe type of content needed to con-

nect with this target audience; etc.

8. UGC Rating and Reviews

Product and services with reviews

have higher conversion rates. As a

business, getting reviews on diff er-ent UGC channels such as Yelp, Tri-

pAdviso r, Google and your site isimportant. Search engines now in-

clude quantity of reviews as part oftheir ranking factors. Users make

their decisions based on quality of

reviews. As a business our job is tolisten, engage, respond, and solve.

9. Deals, Offers, C

contest.

The US economy is fconsumer confidence b

are looking for deals,offers across all cha

Social, Groupon and

media deals sites are number of transaction

What does this mean

Deals and offers do no

deep discounting. Busconsider offering pac

all channels. Value-a

deals help improve gagement and trust. D

offers also receive psearch engine result p

10. Google+, Maps, V

Search

Businesses should sat

nels. It is easier to do

and image search asweb search. Leveragin

nels leads to a significadditional website tra

the crucial steps are: oages and videos on yo

ing search friendly K

creating a place to Google+ business pr

creasing every dayworlds top 100 bran

Google+ pages. Gstarted to impact paid

have further impact o

in 2012 since Google+1 button next to all

recommend creating Gness profiles along w

social profiles. Some tion strategies includ

with customers and cr

etc.We all know that i

complish all the resofor any business. How

tent efforts towards 2012 resolutions wil

very positive ROI foline marketing activit

ResolutionsTop 10 2012

Milestone Internet Marketing is

a full-service Internet marketing

company exclusively for the

travel industry. Milestone has

been providing online hospitality

marketing and consulting

services since 1998. They work

with over 1000 hotels, resorts

and travel clients to design

websites and market and

promote their properties on the

Internet and currently drive over

$500 million in annual revenue

to their clients.

I C i


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silicon i nsilicon i n d i a |28|M a r c h 2 0 1 2

Innovating new business models

We are one of the leaders in high performance analog andmixed-signal ICs, and are present in 35 global locations,

which include 17 design centers. At present the company is

clocking revenue of $761 million (2011). We offer a broadrange of analog and mixed-signal products for power man-

agement, analog and mixed-signal, and consumer products.In the past decade, the company has grown, both organically

and inorganically, having made several acquisitions, andwidening its product portfolio.

In the semi-con industry, one would either find a fables

company or one with fabs. But we have come up with aunique model called the asset-lite and its manufacturing

benefits include, access to advanced technologies, special-

In Conversation

ized technologies that are retained in-

house, flexible capacity, and reducedrisk. We are focused on developing more

integrated and intelligent products that

simplify customers design process.

Key growth drivers to bet on

Semi-con industry is a very wide one, but

we have narrowed our focus by identify-ing top 10 growth drivers, which are ac-

tive cables, audio, automotive, dense

power conversion, digital power man-agement, digital power modules, PC

power management, pico projectors, op-tical sensors, and security surveillance.

For high performance digital powermanagement, we are adopting patented

Zilker Labs digital-DC technology. It can

be easily configured for a range of sys-tem requirements. There is a high level

of integration and embedded intelli-gence, as well as PMBus interface. In-

tersil developed the worlds firstencapsulated digital power modules. A

complete power solution, it has the con-

troller, MOSFETs, and all discrete com-ponents.

The company has a complete picoprojector chipset solution as well that

supports LED and laser-based systems.Native green lasers are now enabling

scanned laser systems. The company hasalso witnessed a large growth in pico

projectors. While three million units

were shipped in 2011, 58 million unitsare forecasted to be shipped in 2015. Pico

projectors will soon be embedded innotebooks, smartphones and tablets.

In automotive, the company is fo-cusing on affordability, connectivity, ef-

ficiency, and safety. Trends include

Li-ion multi-cell balancing and monitor-ing, start-stop system power, LCD dis-

play processors, ambient light sensors,and D2Audio premium sound. Among

active cables, consumer products are de-manding higher data rates. There are

higher resolution displays, such as HD,

WXGA, as well as faster I/O like PCIeand upgrade to USB. More power is re-

quired for faster charging.

In dense power conversion, we are

creating extremely dense DC-DC con-verters, with controllers and power

MOSFETs. High switching frequency

with smaller external components is re-quired, as is advanced packaging with

a stacked die to minimize package foot-print. Optical sensors is another interest

of area. The highest performance unitsare looking at devices that match human

eye response, have best infrared rejection

and lowest power consumption. A vari-ety of sensor functions include ambient

light, short-range proximity, and long-range proximity (up to two meters).

User-presence detection and non-contactgesture recognition are opening new pos-

sibilities.

As for audio, Intersil has been pro-viding amazing audio such as sound

bars, docking stations, home theater sys-tems, and automotive infotainment. The

DSP+ClassD amplifier is a single chipsolution. In PC power management, we

have 70 percent share in notebook Vcore

power. It has optimized solution for allplatforms desktops, notebooks,

tablets, and ultrabooks. F

rity surveillance, we havethe leaders in video dec

rity surveillance. The new

simplify DVR design. Ifunctions include securit

(SLOC) and Fisheye len

Focusing on the India M

India will be the worlds f

sumer market by 2015.

consumption is likely to over 20 years, with 54 pe

dians being under 25 yeathe second most favored

foreign direct investmeworld.

Intersil is targeting k

India automotive temanagement and

defense/mil/space powhigh speed, ADC solution

vices, and international dfor direct application sup

ence design support. Th

design houses segmentworth $16.8 billion, grow

of 17 percent by 2020. ments in India are the VL

bedded software board/hardware design, r

The Intersil India cente

Though we have just s

management team now, in India since 2004, with

galore. Later we acquirHyderabad in 2007. Cur

40 employees with Ramas the MD. Over the yea

product developments h

by the India team. The 4has been designing state

performance analog VLing product developme

collaborating with the FAto serve the Indian mark

As of now, the focu

a strong sales and partnincrease the presence

customers here. si

Intersi l Corpor ation (NAS DAQ: ISI L), is a

global technolo gy company, specia lizing in thedesign and manufacture of high performance

analog semiconductors. Based in Milpitas,

California, Intersil has had a continued focus

on leading in attractive high performance

analog markets while increasing

profita bility and cash flow; provid ing it a

sustainab le long-t erm mode l for suc cess.

Intersil began its transf ormation into a high

performance ana log company in 2003, with the

divestiture of its wireless business. Its products

address three of the industrys fastest growing

markets flat panel displays, optical storage

(for CD and DVD recordable products), and

power manage ment. Its leade rship product s

include amplifiers, analog front ends,

communication interfaces, data converters,

digital potentiometers, display solutions, DSLsoluti ons, optica l storag e product s, power

management products, power sequencers, real

time clocks, smart batteries, switches/MUX's,

VoIP products, and ICs for military, space and

rad-hard applications.

Eori e iio orIisemicocor Mre

Dave Bell

Worldwide mobile datatraffic will increase 18-foldover the next five years,reaching 10.8 exabytes permonth - or an annual run rateof 130 exabytes - by 2016.The expected sharp increasein mobile traffic is due, inpart, to a projected surge inthe number of mobileInternet-connected devices,

which will exceed thenumber of people on earth.

Courtesy: Cisco Visual NetworkingIndex

In a recent visit to India,Dave Bell, CEO, Intersiltalks about expansion plans in India, setting up a focused India

center and the plans to penetrate the Indian market.

M t


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silicon insilicon i n d i a |30|M a r c h 2 0 1 2

Management

to the team. His creativity plays an im-

portant role in inspiring the team tostay afloat during hard times.

THE CONSERVATIST - Playing the

game the traditional way; he might beseen by some, as bordering on the bor-

ing. He may not accept or adapt to rad-ical changes in the workplace initially.

He remains calm in the face of adver-sity, but you know you can depend on

him to deliver the goods when it mat-

ters.

THE FUTURIST - At some stage,

you have already earmarked your suc-cessor. But till then, there are those

small chinks in the armor that needfixing. Take him under your wing

when a crisis strikes, and you know

you are making an investment for thefuture.

THE BULLS AND BEARS GUY He frustratingly seems to have his

back to the right things in life at times.His career graph reads inconsistency.

Count on him to deliver and he disap-

points; and when you least expect it,SMACK, he has everyone running for

cover. Hone him, motivate him; hewill soon bloom into a fine, depend-

able professional.

MR. EQ - The guy whose heart rules

over his mind, but you know that hecontinues to deliver value to the or-

ganization and is a vital cog in your

team. Help to channelize his emotionstowards common team objectives, and

presto, you have a hero for all occa-sions.

MR. DEPENDABLE A completeteam player, one you know can be

handed complete responsibility of that

large customer who demands strict ad-herence to service level agreements,

and your man is always spot on.

THE PERCEIVED WEAK LINK-

A team is only as strong as the weak-

est link. It is important to shield himand protect him, because you know

that he is not that bright, eager-to-

impress guy who will always have hishand up during strategic meetings, but

the one who might just drop into yourcabin later that day and blow you

away with a brilliant idea.

THE SPOTLIGHT JUNKIE An

extremely talented individual; love

him or hate him, but you cant ignorehim. You can see that hes trying too

hard at times. You want him in yourteam and you need him in your team.

Yes, he behaves like a spoilt brat, butyou are clearly aware of the sheer

magic he is capable of.

MR. NICE GUY Your 4 a.m. guy,who will only be too eager to help the

team with something in the middle ofthe night; hes the one who makes

you want to spend more time withyour team.

THE JOKER Not to be confused

with the Heath Ledger type; ofcourse, he is your man

to lift the saggingteam morale during

difficult times. He willbe the guy who brings

in some comic reliefduring an intense busi-

ness discussion.

YOURS TRULY Itis important to come

to terms with yourown style of function-

ing before you startstamping your author-

ity over business mat-

ters. Always consultand have immense

faith in your team todeliver the goods. You

need to take ownership

go awry, but for everytcan pass it on to your t

All this looks good

till the team goes on a dral. Client payments no

time, no new customelast quarter, etc., and ev

out to hunt you downmedia is going for D

right now. Persevere!

well in your favor oncannot go wrong so dr

all cricket lovers proclTemporary, Class is Pe

Henry Ford, FoundMotor Company, onc

concept of Teamwork i

points: Coming togetning; Working togethe

Achieving together isvesting time on your t

you reap rich dividendbe aligned to your c

and help you chart th

tinued success. si

Last year, the world watched in rapt atten-

tion, a lad from Ranchi and the captain ofthe Indian cricket team lift the World Cup

after 28 years. Would you believe if some-one told you that Mahendra Singh Dhoni started off

in school playing football, and that he was oncepushed to represent a local cricket club by his foot-

ball coach? He impressed everyone with his wicket-

keeping skills and the rest is the stuff that dreamsare made of.

The media went from town to town praising thenew Messiah of Indian cricket, Captain Cool. But

surely, he didnt win the championship on his own.It was team effort; Esprit De Corps! What he inher-

ited from his predecessor was a motley mix of su-

perstars and maverick young guns, and look at howhe turned them into a winning outfit. And that very

fabric is essential to the success of any company.You cant run a company on your own, nor can

you run a company only on hard work. You need tal-ent, flair, diversity, and sustainability. You just need

to find the right mix. No movie can be complete

without its supporting cast, right? So lets try and as-semble a team, let the jigsaw fall into place, and

there would be nothing else left to explain.

THE VETERAN - The most experienced pro in

your team; he has always strived to achieve so muchfor the company. Your go to man in a crisis . He was

in the company when you were in college. Peoplerespect him for his experience. He is by no means an

individual contributor; rather the fulcrum around

which the team revolves.

THE MAVERICK -When he is in his elements,you know that all-important business deals are inyour kitty. He might lose his focus at times and it is

up to you to get him to concentrate on the matter athand. His sheer unpredictability makes him an asset

Cable & Wireless Worldwide PLC (LSE: CW) is a multinational telecommunications company, headBracknell, United Kingdom. It specializes in providing communication services to large corporates, govern

customers, and resellers. Its services include managed voice, data, and IP based services and applications a

Asia Pacific, India, Middle East & Africa, Continental Europe, and North America. Established i

Cable&Wireless Worldwide helps more than 6,000 organizations deliver their goals.

EnJOy yOuR CRICkEt andManagE yOuR tEaMsuCCEssfully tOO!By Shali Thilakan,Managing Director India and South Asia, Cable&Wireless Worldwide

Shali Thilakan

Rear View


17/25

silicon i n dsilicon i n d i a |32|M a r c h 2 0 1 2

(growing business) or the bottom-line(improving efficiencies), the enterprises

typically want those insights faster. Thisis where near-realtime-analytics comes

into the picture. Being able to analyzebillions of financial transactions in a day

and point out fraudulent ones is a case of

batch-oriented analytics. To be able to dothis before approving a transaction, is

real-time analytics. Being able to predicta fraudulent transaction looking at

emerging patterns is an example of near-realtime-analytics. Each of these classes

of analytics needs very different technol-ogy solutions.

Below are some of the getting started

myths in the Big Data Analytics space:

1. Virtualization has no place here:

Virtualized environments along with theright tools to keep focus on developing

business logic, help in getting startedwith Big Data Analytics.

2. I need a 100-node cluster to do

anything meaningful: 10-node clustercan be used to process 250 billion records

of auto-support data. Most enterprisesdont need anything more than a 30-node

cluster and a few need a 100-node cluster.Trying to emulate a 6000-node cluster, as

touted by Internet companies is overkill

for most enterprises.

3. Commodity is cheap: Using com-

modity components such as DAS (directattached storage) is not always cheap. It

is important to look at more practicalmetrics, like the usable storage capacity,

the total cost of ownership and manage-

ment simplicity to reduce operator inter-ventions. Enterprises should develop

their own cost models to determine thedegree of impact of these aspects in their

solutions.

4. Store all the data: Some organiza-

tions will still store all of it, for compli-ance or other reasons. But, most

organizations would want to be given the

option of knowing what to delete. Thus,being able to provide the insight into

what data might be more important thanthe other will become critical for an or-

ganization.

5. I still need to know the question:

Machine-learning techniques are a veryinteresting form of mechanisms that are

emerging so that the patterns presentthemselves rather than a human having

to manually arrange data along differentdimensions and experiment with the data

to find the interesting ones. Clustering

and classification algorithms help ineliminating noise and arranging data in a

manner such that the insights present- it-self. These are some of the advanced an-

alytics techniques that data scientists willspecialize in. However, this is not

panacea, and drill-down interactive ana-lytics will not go away.

I still consider most Big Data solu-

tions in the market as an extension of theexperiment conducted by some Inter-

net companies, in the open source. Thatexperimental infrastructure does not ex-

tend itself naturally into enterprises and Istill do not see any of the Hadoop distri-

butions or solutions providing an Enter-

prise-grade Hadoop. There are still a lotof inefficiencies:

Resource utilizations are very low,and highly imbalanced in a Hadoop

cluster The total cost of ownership is high

The tenets of cluster expansion only

tend to further worsen the resource uti-lization in Hadoop clusters

Prevention against comes with probabilities

it, rather than a 100 perc Faults are not containe

and thus result in lowereetc.

Data unrolling as a

viding HA is highly inescale

All these aspects malow-grade batch-oriente

not for a production envstringent SLAs. Further,

way to leverage emerginlike flash in this space, t

spots. There is no way I c

effective and automatedthese solutions.

Big Data is just abouthe infrastructures and s

Data Analytics are still aam keenly watching MRv

sion of Map-Reduce) in

would help expand the Hadoop into different in

having their own compuI am also keenly watching

ect of Hadoop evolve andbecome the metadata re

enterprise, also helping b

ent data center technologpect Hadoop Mahout to

iterative paradigms wouwith MRv2 and adva

would get that huge impeFinally, I expect near-re

to become mainstream

tional models supportingdrill-down analysis to be

place.A couple of indirect

that Big Data Content highly optimized $/GB

high resiliency charaemerge. Replication as a

data resiliency in Big Da

tions will diminish. Finafootprints will emerge a

trol point going forwardtime analytics solu

batch-analytics will movprovided through a SaaS

Gaurav Makkar, Technical Director (Office of CTO), NetApp

Rear View

While the overalldomestic IT spending isexpected to grow at aCAGR of 12 percent toreach $36 billion by 2015,SMBs at the same timewill grow at a CAGR of 15

percent contributing $15billion by 2015.

Courtesy: Zinnov

Last few years have been an era of nebulous buzz-words in our industry thathave caught on like wild-fire. First it was SaaS, then Cloud and now Big

Data, and not that the first two have gone away. It is also interesting to seehow the latest kid-on-the-block (Big Data) plays in the context of the former ones. But

first, lets set some context.Big Data covers a number of different dimensions and means different things to dif-

ferent organizations. Big Data has been defined as something which is as simple as

ABC. The Big Data space has been segmented into Big Data Analytics, B

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