Download - About DevFactory

Transcript
Page 1: About DevFactory

Who is Trilogy? Trilogy is one of the largest privately held enterprise so!ware companies. Post 2008, Trilogy has been acquiring Enterprise So!ware "rms, turning them around and aligning them to deliver phenomenal value for enterprise customers. Trilogy actively hired from all top engineering colleges in India (IIT, NIT, NSIT, Anna Univ, etc) from 2000- 2008. Trilogy was THE dream company for every Engineering graduate with strong background in Computer Science.

Visit www.trilogy.com

What is Trilogy’s culture like?Trilogy’s hiring philosophy is ‘Only the best’. Trilogy’s great people brought about tremendous value to its clients by solving their hardest business problems with technology. Trilogy has been rated among the Top 3 most entrepreneurial company alumni networks. Trilogeans have gone on to found some very exciting companies, and also are in CXO positions in many others. See this recent article on FounderDating.com about Trilogy’s entrepreneurial alumni network.

http://founderdating.com/entrepreneurial-company-alumni/

Answers to your questions.

What is DevFactory?Trilogy hived o# its R&D activities to a division called DevFactory, which was incorporated as a separate entity in Dubai in 2008. Trilogy and DevFactory are part of the same group of companies and share the same top management.

What does DevFactory do?DevFactory is probably the world’s "rst and only so!ware factory. We are disrupting the way enterprise so!ware is created by adopting a factory-style model for development and delivery. DevFactory has been built ground up on the basis of innovative processes and tools that are our Intellectual Property (IP). We manage massive scale yet provide great cost savings and high quality in our work. $is is, by the way, the complete opposite of conventional so!ware development, where scale o!en leads to quality issues, cost and time overruns. Besides above, DevFactory also does development for 30+ Enterprise products that Trilogy has acquired over the last few years.

Who are DevFactory’s clients?Fortune 500 companies. DevFactory’s products help solve the biggest and most complex problems for Fortune 500 companies’ CTOs and CIOs.

Page 2: About DevFactory

What are DevFactory’s products?We have over 30 products. Some examples are Gensym, Prologic, Accept So!ware, Artemis and the products under the Versata banner. Versata is a Trilogy company. For more information, please refer to the case studies in this document or visit www.versata.com

What technologies do you use?$e 30+ products span all technologies, be it Java, C++, C#, Lisp etc…. Engineers have chance to choose whatever technologies suit them best.

What is the role of the So!ware Development Engineer (SDE) like?$is role requires the SDEs to don multiple hats - strategic + technology + delivery – at the same time. You will:

1. Understand the core business problems that our customers face.

2. Suggest technical solutions that will help solve these problems.

3. Create and deliver these solutions, so that it generates immense value to our customers and helps them focus on growing their business.

$e term ‘So!ware Development Engineer’ is probably a misnomer and the role could have well been called ‘Strategic Development Engineer’, or ‘Problem-solver’ or ‘Value-creator’

What is the compensation for a campus hire?Rs 22 Lakhs/year + 1 Lakh joining bonus + 1 Lakh DU graduation bonus

What is the growth path at DevFactoryOn the technical side, you will start as a SDE, then grow into a Technical Architect position and further reach the Chief Product Architect position. Of course, all these positions will pay the best Industry compensations. If the employee wants, once you develop a strong technical base, there would be options to move into the business/management side of things as well.

What is DevFactory University?DevFactory University (DU) is a one-of-its-kind training meant to transform our student recruits into tech professionals. $is 90-day program is modeled on the legendary Trilogy University training program and will be held at Dubai, UAE.DU, earlier known as TU (Trilogy University), was conceptualized from the ‘US Navy Seal Training Program’. DU focuses on creating an incubation environment with optimal conditions for a fresh graduate to have accelerated learning at a fast pace and become a thorough problem solver at the end of 3 months. Post DU, the freshers turn to seasoned techies who can solve any problem that come their way. What more, DU is a bootcamp where DevFactory’s culture of trust and responsibility is instilled. $e camaraderie built up through these 3 months lasts forever. $ese 3 months are going to be the best of your career! Harvard Business Review did a case study on TU (Trilogy University). Read the article at this link: http://hbr.org/2001/04/no-ordinary-boot-camp/ar/1

Page 3: About DevFactory

Why is DU being held in Dubai?$ere are two reasons:

1. DevFactory’s headquarters is in Dubai and our CEO, Rahul Subramaniam and some of our key chief architects are based in Dubai, while we create a similar team for India. We take DU very seriously and ensure the freshers have direct access to all the best talent we have when they are wracking their brains to create the next best products for the organization.

2. Dubai is a multi-cultural, fun place that aligns well with our concept of ‘Work hard, play hard’. At DevFactory, there is a thin line of di#erence between work and fun and while we take our work seriously, we take fun seriously as well. DevFactory plans to spend >$1M on its DU Program during these three months.

A!er DU, where is the job location?Bangalore.

Will the recruited students need to sign a contract?Students will be hired as regular employees of the Indian entity. $ere will be no contract or bond.

Is this a paid training?Absolutely. Not only will the recruited students be paid full salaries during the entire duration of the training, the complete expenses in Dubai including travel, accommodation and other fun activities will be company sponsored.

What happens a!er DU?A!er DU, all the projects are assessed and if there are product ideas that pass all the tests - the team gets to further works on the idea. Others pass DU and work on the existing products of DevFactory.

Will we be assessed again a!er DU?We are sticky about "nding the perfect culture "t for DevFactory and our selection process is geared in that direction. We hold a high bar because DU is not only one of the best training bootcamps in the so!ware industry, it is also one of the most intensive bootcamps that ensures an exponential learning at an accelerated pace. Most of the time our hires live this. However exceptions have happened very few times, when some fresh graduates are not able to take this pace and we mutually have to agree to part ways. It is worthy to note that, as per historical records, 95-98% of the batch graduates each time. $ere have been several instances of 100% of the batch graduating. Having said that, Trilogy is a hiring ground for most big product organizations. An exiting TUer in the past has never had challenge in immediately "nding superlative opportunity.

Can the students have a career in Dubai?At this moment, we don’t have a "rm stand on this and are open to discussing this with individuals based on interest.

Page 4: About DevFactory

"e DevFactory website does not have much information. Why?Most companies %ood their website with two kinds of information 1. What they do and how they do it 2. Who their customers are and what they deliver to them.

DevFactory has a unique operating and delivery model that gives it a huge competitive advantage in the market. $is is our intellectual property (IP) and we therefore never share this information in the public domain. We solve some of the hardest problems for some of the largest customers on the planet. $ese customers too don’t like to share these details in the public domain and therefore require us to act accordingly. $erefore, while some of the largest companies in the world rely on us for solving their hardest problems, we don’t have content that we are at liberty to share in the public domain.

I read some negative reviews online. Can you explain that please?In order to ful"ll our work, we hire a large number of contractors as well. $is network of contractors is over 1500 strong and works seamlessly to generate great value for our customers as a global team. However, like in any organization, there is always a small percentage of disgruntled employees. Traditionally, companies manage their reputation online using brute force of SEO and %ood the internet with articles about themselves. $is results in bad reviews getting lower page rankings.

DevFactory, however is not able to put out a large number of articles for two reasons:

1. Any discussion about our processes would mean sharing parts of our IP in public. $is IP has been painstakingly developed a!er years of research and learning. Exposing these in public would mean erosion of our competitive advantage.

2. We solve some of hardest problems for some of the largest companies in the world. Our clients would not want to publicize these problems and have comprehensive non-disclosure agreements with us that disallows using their names as clients. We are also bound to not discuss the type of sensitive work we do for them.

So, we could have chosen to populate the Internet with meaningless articles for the pure purpose of SEO. Such a method consumes a lot of time and energy, and frankly not quite right. We would rather choose to spend all our e#orts and time in continuously creating value for our customers through innovation.

How true is it about DevFactory trying to save tax by having operations in the UAE?Like every company, DevFactory tries its best to manage its resources wisely. DevFactory was incorporated in Dubai for two reasons:

1. Excellent infrastructure, a truly multi-cultural city and centrally located to our global customer base

2. Close proximity to excellent talent pools in India, China, Eastern Europe etc.

It is an added bonus that Dubai happens to be a tax free zone. To be clear, DevFactory is not a shell company incorporated in Dubai. DevFactory enjoys a tax-free status due to the massive amount of value and intellectual property (both in terms of patents and trade secrets) it generates from its operations in Dubai.

Page 5: About DevFactory

Why did Trilogy close operations in India?Trilogy did extremely well in the enterprise so!ware domain and today is one of the largest privately held enterprises. It attracted the best talent both from top campuses and industry. At Trilogy, we think disruptively and passionate about keeping a competitive edge in everything we do. "e year 2008 saw a wave in outsourcing and Trilogy loved to experiment in this newly created global eco-system. We then closed our India entity and ensured that we o#er all the great talent we had on our rolls as consultants. We also set up a separate outsourcing partner network. In $ve years, we experimented and had a huge learning that got us to start DevFactory (Development arm of Trilogy) in India and do what we do BEST which is spot and hire the best technical talent and solve some of the largest problems in the enterprise space. Trilogy is now an equity company, and DevFactory is what Trilogy was before in 2000-2008.

Why are you doing your campus hiring so late?We $nalized our India plans early this year, post which the logistics planning took time to hit the campuses.

Which colleges are you hiring from?In 2014, we have already visited oncampus on top tier1 colleges such as IITs, MNNIT, IIITs, NSIT, DTU, PESIT, RVCE and Anna University. O# Campus round will also have participation from students of colleges of similar caliber.

How many students do you look forward to hire?"ere is in$nite demand. We plan to hire the absolute best minds in India. "ere is no upper limit, we will hire anyone who meets our quality bar. Realistically speaking, we anticipate to be able to get 35-40 such students.

What is your assessment process?Test: We will have a technical online test on 4th May, 5pm - 7pm. "is test will assess students strength in Computer Science fundamentals - Algorithms, Datastructures, Problem solving and Programming.

Interviews: Post the test we will need 1-3 days to communicate the list of students shortlisted for interviews. Shortlisted students will have 2-3 rounds of technical interviews, further assessing their Computer Science fundamentals. First round of interviews will be over skype followed by in-person interviews. We will handle the expenses for the student’s travel.

Page 6: About DevFactory

Corporate Boot Camps. We’ve all heard about them. Many of us have

lived through them. In my case, I’ve even invented a number of them. It’s fair to say that, while some achieve their goals better than others, they’re all pretty much the same. $ey typically focus on knowledge transfer—informing new hires, for instance, about the company’s products and markets and how to access key resources in the organization. $e best ones, like those at GE and Ford, do this by having the recruits work on real business problems, where intense teamwork is required to meet tight deadlines (a technique I’ve described elsewhere as “compressed action learning”). I’ve studied them all. I thought I’d seen it all.

But then I saw Trilogy University. It was 1998, and I was traveling around the country, studying corporate universities as part of a benchmarking research project on action learning. Within days of my arrival, I knew Trilogy University was a breed apart—in fact, my de"nition of best

practice shot out to the horizon line. I’ve spent hundreds of hours since then at TU, documenting its unconventional approach—and its phenomenal results. (It should be stated, by way of full disclosure, that I brie%y consulted to Trilogy last year on the matter of its reorganization. But my relationship to the company and its university at this point is purely as an observer.)

Modeled a!er Marine Corps basic training, a corporate boot camp is designed to push new recruits to their limits. Each day o#ers some nearly insurmountable challenge, and the reward for overcoming it

is an even harder one the next day. It’s intense and intimidating, but people emerge on the other end of the program highly con"dent that they are prepared for anything. $ey also come away with deep bonds to their fellow recruits and strong ties to the organization.

$ose two goals—preparedness and bonding—are usually the whole focus of a boot camp, and achieving them is worth a great deal. $at’s why so many of the top-performing companies put their faith in such programs. In the mid-1980s, I ran General Electric’s Crotonville leadership development center, where I led

NO ORDINARY BOOT CAMPby Noel M. Tichy

Harvard Business Review published this article on Trilogy University. $e article can be viewed online at http://hbr.org/2001/04/no-ordinary-boot-camp/ar/1 $is will give you insight into what makes DevFactory/Trilogy the ideal space for tomorrow’s leaders.

Page 7: About DevFactory

the development of its Corporate Entry Leadership Conference, a three-day program in which new hires learn about GE’s strategy, its culture, and a bit about themselves. “Old man Watson” at IBM ran them, as did Ross Perot when he founded EDS, as does Andy Grove at Intel. And for years, the commercial banks have run their commercial-lending boot camps for college hires. In the past decade, consulting "rms and service organizations have dramatically increased their investments in boot camps for new recruits. Accounting giant Arthur Andersen, for instance, has a 700-bed facility in St. Charles, Illinois, which runs at capacity year-round. Many old-line industrials have also set them up because they realize that energizing new hires and engaging them in the culture is just as critical as making sure they have the technical skills to do their speci"c jobs.

$e interesting thing about Trilogy University is that it achieves those goals and more. Much more. It also serves as the company’s primary R&D engine and as its way of developing its next generation of leadership. It even succeeds as the impetus and incubator for Trilogy’s strategic

thinking. How can it do all that? By now, it almost couldn’t fail to, thanks to a virtuous cycle that was established early and continues to gain momentum. In the simplest terms, these things happen at TU because top leadership is on the scene and deeply engaged in it—and top leadership stays on the scene and deeply engaged in TU because these essential activities are happening there.

Welcome to TrilogyTrilogy University is the orientation program of Austin, Texas-based Trilogy, designed to turn the company’s raw recruits—hired straight o# the campuses of MIT, Stanford, U. Michigan, and the like—into highly productive contributors. Started in 1995, it is the brainchild of Trilogy’s president and CEO, Joe Liemandt, and its vice president of marketing, John Price.$e company has a pressing need for new-employee orientation because its growth has been extremely rapid, and the biggest drag on growth has been the di&culty of recruiting and bringing new talent up to speed. Trilogy started fast out of the gate in 1989 when Liemandt nailed a market opportunity to create “con"guration so!ware” for large manufacturers like

Hewlett-Packard and Boeing. $e products these companies sell have innumerable variants, as alternative components are assembled to suit each buyer’s highly speci"c preferences. Trilogy’s so!ware solves a huge problem traditionally faced in the selling process by allowing a salesperson with a laptop to translate a customer’s needs into a workable speci"cation. $e so!ware spots where components are incompatible, for instance, or where one part requires another, and it con"gures a system that will work. $en—and this is really important to those salespeople—it produces an accurate price quote on the spot.

Trilogy’s breakthrough allowed it to do something most small so!ware companies only dream of: sign up brand-name accounts like Hewlett-Packard while the product was still in its infancy. Since then, Trilogy has expanded on its original o#ering to launch e-commerce applications for both the buying and selling of products, and its revenues have grown to about $200 million. Along the way, its employee base has grown 35% annually. In 2000, the company brought 450 new hires into an existing organization of 1,000.

Page 8: About DevFactory

“$ere must be a ton of people from Google in the FounderDating Network,” an entrepreneur recently commented to me. “Ya, there are, but what makes you say that?” I responded. “Everyone knows people leave Google to start companies and Google is such an entrepreneurial place,” he said without hesitation.

$at got me thinking, there are a lot of lists out there: “Great Places to Work” or “Most Innovative Companies”, but few have looked at how entrepreneurial the alumni networks of di#erent companies actually are. We decided this would be super interesting to "gure out. FounderDating is a curated network – people apply, we literally screen and reference everyone and then invite a sub-segment to join. Submitting an application means you have high entrepreneurial intent – either you have or you really want to start something. Using this as a key indicator of entrepreneurial intent, we crunched the data (over 100K data points). What we found may surprise you…

Surprises and Insights

$e Top 3: IDEO, Bazaarvoice, Trilogy

$ey might not be the companies you immediately think of, but these alumni networks have a seriously high concentration of people with high entrepreneurial intent. It’s not all that surprising that a!er helping other companies be more innovative, you’d want to go start something that allows you to do the same. IDEOers have spawned great companies from Plum Organics to Mailbox.

What’s Trilogy you say? One alum described their network as “the Paypal ma"a without as much money.” Alums have started companies like Zocdoc, MassRelevance, Capital Factory, H.Bloom and Bazaarvoice. And it seems that last one has come full circle.

Founderdating.com published this article on entrepreneurial alumni. $e article can be viewed online at http://founderdating.com/entrepreneurial-company-alumni/

Page 9: About DevFactory

100% CUSTOMER SUCCESS POWERED BY OUR TECHNOLOGYREAD A FEW STORIES ABOUT HOW OUR PRODUCTS ARE DRIVING SUCCESS FOR OUR FORTUNE 500 CUSTOMERS. CAMPUS HIRES WILL GET THE OPPORTUNITY TO DEVELOP THESE PRODUCTS AND ALSO COME UP WITH IDEAS FOR NEW PRODUCTS.

Page 10: About DevFactory

BackgroundVSK (Västerås Systemkonsult AB) was established in Sweden more than 35 years ago by three IT experts who had worked together for years. !eir experience in building planning and administrative data systems together culminated in the creation of EmiR, an ERP system with integrated business processes.

VSK has always looked for ways to simplify their EmiR product, which is why in 1999 they decided to move to Versata BRMS as their platform. Versata’s use of declarative rules, versus having to program every action and reaction, simpli"ed EmiR substantially by raising its level of abstraction.

Today, all new functions necessary to make VSK customers successful are built on Versata. !e Versata platform minimizes client code by declaring rules on the server side, which these customers – many of whom have been with VSK

for decades – appreciate greatly. Versata makes it possible for VSK clients to keep EmiR even as they build and adapt to new ERP systems, ranging from Oracle to SAP and more.

FAST2 Is BornTwo decades a#er VSK began serving clients in the ERP space, they developed a system on behalf of a group of public housing nonpro"t organizations. !e system became a product, and then became a company – the company was named FAST2. A#er an initial release that le# them wanting more, FAST2 began its long journey using Versata BRMS as the platform.

FAST2 is an administrative system used for real estate and property management – primarily for the very popular publically owned apartment (adult and student) housing in Sweden. Because FAST2 is built on Versata BRMS, development tasks on FAST2 can be divided based on skill level. In other words, one developer can

specialize in declaring business rules, while another can specialize in writing the Java code that will be triggered by those rules.

FAST2 TodayWhile there are competitors to FAST2, none have the $exibility that FAST2 o%ers, thanks to the Versata BRMS platform. Most systems run on a single platform, whereas Java-based FAST2 can run on Linux, Windows, Mac OS and more.

It’s due in part to this fact that "#een years a#er starting the journey with Versata BRMS, FAST2 has become an unequivocal success. Many companies in Sweden, ranging from small to very large, are using FAST2 – and therefore Versata – to manage a wide range of properties. From industrial buildings to public housing, royal castles to student apartments, FAST2 is behind the places that house countless Swedes.

VSK DRIVES SUCCESS WITH VERSATA

Versata’s powerful Business Rules Management System (BRMS) allows customers to write, build and test robust applications in a matter of minutes, leveraging the power of rules-based logic to build better, faster business applications. !e case study can be viewed online at http://www.versatabrms.com/read-success-story

Page 11: About DevFactory

Overview

!e trading of equities and bonds, symbolized in the “ticker crawl,” epitomizes real-time transaction processing in the "nancial services industry. Each transaction $owing across the screen is the culmination of a series of front-middle and back-o&ce processes that require accurate and timely execution.

Nomura International plc is the London-based, European subsidiary of Nomura Securities, Japan’s largest securities "rm and one the world’s leading investment banks. When Nomura re-architected its technology infrastructure to replace its legacy systems, it chose ObjectStore® to ensure that its newly designed systems could deliver the scalability that its equities and bond trading operation required.

Nomura’s original system infrastructure had used an IBM mainframe platform that required

traders to execute trades with COBOL-based applications, accessing 3270 screens via Windows-based terminal emulation. !e system was slow and in$exible, o%ering neither the scalability to accommodate an expanding customer base nor the agility to o%er new "nancial products.

In response, Nomura’s London o&ce began a major initiative, Hoodini (Highly Object-Oriented Development in Nomura International), that is frequently cited for its innovative use of object-oriented technology. Hoodini completely revamped the Nomura systems architecture, transforming a mainframe environment into a three-tiered, distributed platform. And, as the “oo” of Hoodini suggests, a key component of the new architecture was its use of an object-oriented programming model, which allows Nomura to $exibly express trade validation rules. !is object-oriented

approach also helps the system adapt easily to the evolution of the "nancial services industry and its associated regulations.

Accurate and accessible reference data

A key contributor to Hoodini’s capabilities within Nomura’s Strategic Middle O&ce (SMO) solution set was the rapid data access facilitated by ObjectStore. ObjectStore operates as a data cache to Sybase, Nomura’s database of record, and delivers the reference data that is needed to execute trades, in real time.

Reference data includes information about customers, "nancial instruments, transaction types, and the trade settlement process. !ough reference data traditionally is considered “static” (when compared to more volatile stock prices and market information), solid management

OBJECTSTORE DELIVERS VALUE FOR NOMURA

ObjectStore is the leading in-memory database for applications that demand high-performance, extreme scalability and real time responsiveness. !e case study can be viewed online at http://www.objectstore.com/read-success-story

Page 12: About DevFactory

of reference data is a crucial element to e&cient trading operations.

Accurate reference data is an acknowledged problem within the "nancial services industry, representing a signi"cant barrier to the straight-through processing (STP) initiatives of many securities "rms. !e USbased Securities Industry Association (SIA) cites statistics that 30% of all transactions fail to execute properly because of poor data. !e operational impact of such failures is signi"cant—with the cost increasing the further into the trade process that a problem is detected. Resolving errors at trade settlement can cost ten times what it would take to have caught the issue at the trader’s desk.

Having the right information in real time, as trades are processed greatly enhances accuracy, e&ciency, and pro"tability. !at philosophy prompted Nomura to embrace the value of data caching, as delivered through ObjectStore. Nomura anticipated a signi"cant increase in trading volumes in the years a#er initial deployment. Given that assumption, Nomura foresaw data access as the major performance constraint on the scalability of its distributed, service-oriented architecture. To utilize Sybase for overall reference data management, yet address the demands for scalability given the high-volume

demands for access to the data, Nomura implemented ObjectStore.

As deployed within Nomura’s middle o&ce, ObjectStore provides traders with a high-speed cache of the data needed to validate trades, thus enabling that critical step to be performed early in the trade execution lifecycle and without unduly impacting Sybase. Use of ObjectStore has enhanced the value of Sybase as custodian of reference data and the actual trade execution engine by relieving the burdensome query processing that would have otherwise limited scalability of the overall solution.

In addition to trade validation, ObjectStore also supports a range of ad hoc query capabilities for traders. !ese queries enable traders to view reference data outside the context of a speci"c transaction. Nomura utilizes a graphical user interface that provides access to a list of stored queries.

!is enable traders to check on client positions and various other elements of reference data, further o'oading work from the Sybase back end system.

Objectstore data: Accurate and accessible

As deployed within Nomura’s middle o&ce, the cache of reference data encompasses "ve instances of ObjectStore running on Sun application servers. !ese server deployments collectively support close to 600 distributed, local caches utilized for trade validation and query processing. Data integrity between ObjectStore and Sybase is maintained by an update process that propagates changes from Sybase to ObjectStore automatically. Within ObjectStore, the product’s patented Cache-Forward™ Architecture (CFA) automatically ensures that data is consistent across all the caches as well as with the data managed within Sybase.

Nomura’s trading operation processes an average of 10-12,000 trades a day, with peaks of 30,000. !ose trades—and other activities—generate changes in Sybase which, in turn, are synchronized with ObjectStore. To allow traders to access cached data at in-memory speeds while updates are applied to Sybase, Nomura has utilized the ObjectStore Multi-Version Concurrency Control (MVCC) feature. Traders can access the cache simultaneously with the processing of changes received from the update process. Use of MVCC avoids the lock contention and access latency that would normally result from those cache updates. ObjectStore is the only data caching solution in the industry to o%er MVCC capabilities.

Page 13: About DevFactory

$GPGƂVU�QH�Objectstore at Nomura

ObjectStore’s deployment as part of the Hoodini project has provided signi"cant bene"ts within Nomura’s middle-o&ce operation.

!e ObjectStore CFA in-memory data access delivers real-time, in memory performance for trade validation, which enhances Nomura’s straight-through processing ability, reducing trade error and exception processing, and allowing them to trade better and faster.ObjectStore accelerates access to Sybase data while allowing Sybase to remain the primary custodian of data for the middle o&ce operation. ObjectStore doesn’t usurp the primacy of Sybase as database of record; it enhances it.ObjectStore delivers a highly distributable caching capability that provides a single, consistent, system-wide view of the reference data, managing updates and changes transparent to the traders.

Summary

As the securities industry continues to embrace STP, the imperative to ensure timely access to data will continue to impact system design. Trade execution and settlement within 24 hours (the sought-a#er “T+1”) or more futuristically (“T+0”) cannot be achieved unless trade execution architectures can ensure that all the data needed for completing the individual trade’s lifecycle, can be accessed in real time, with increased accuracy.

Nomura’s ObjectStore-based system embodies the type of real-time data access required by STP systems. Accurate reference data is crucial to trading operations, and early access to that data can drive the pro"tability of a securities trading operation. Much of the current focus within "nancial services is on the settlement process and managing that process e%ectively. !e real-time access at trade validation time enabled by ObjectStore reduces execution errors, and the downstream exception handling they would require. !e acceleration and improvement of trade processing are vital steps that will help facilitate the settlement process as performance and regulatory demands continue to put pressure on the "nancial services industry.

Page 14: About DevFactory

Gensym: Profiles in Customer Success

SITUATION

Dalkia, a subsidiary of Veolia Environnement and Electricité de France (EDF), is a global leader in energy services. The company takes seriously its focus on providing innovative solutions to support the sustainable growth of cities and businesses. In an era of climate change, volatile energy prices and scarce resources, Dalkia offers customers its expertise in developing, constructing and operating greener and more economical energy solutions. With almost 50,000 employees in 35 countries, Dalkia reported managed revenue of €8.9 billion in 2012.

CHALLENGE

Dalkia offers mission-critical energy services to a growing number of businesses, universities, industries and hospitals across the world, but first in Europe. Dalkia’s services are designed as a hub and spoke model, with an expert system “hub” that monitors literally thousands of remote assets “spokes.” The number of spokes has been growing by the day.

With more sites to manage in recent years came a challenge – as usage increased, the loading time of Dalkia’s CRT (Centralized Remote) application was slowing significantly. This issue was increasing costs as highly-trained personnel would have to be onsite with customers for the duration of any loading event to provide immediate support in case of an outage.

The bottom line is that it was simply taking too long to load the application when a restart was needed after updates, upgrades, planned outages or even unplanned outage emergencies. The delays are simply unacceptable in today’s climate. A redundant backup plan is in the works, but doing that correctly takes time, they had to take action on their primary solution immediately. Dalkia reached out to Gensym for help.

Dalkia Keeps Energy Efficient with Gensym

Page 15: About DevFactory

Gensym: Profiles in Customer Success

SOLUTION

At the center of Dalkia’s hub and spoke application model was Gensym G2 Standard. While G2 Standard was highly effective and stable in Dalkia’s earlier years, it wasn’t able to support the increased needs during the company’s extreme growth. G2 Enterprise was supposed to be a faster, easier to use and more scalable version of G2 Standard – but Dalkia didn’t know if that type of upgrade would help.

To determine the most effective solution, Gensym dove into a new engagement with Dalkia, first looking to see what immediate challenges could be remediated. As expected G2 Enterprise was the cornerstone of the solution, maximized by the utilization of Platinum support.

Key Steps:

1. Application Health Check - Profiled and analyzed the entire application leading to improved configuration (memory/CPU) and KB Optimization 2. KB Optimization Delivery - Isolated critical bottlenecks and implemented new ‘generic’ system procedures 3. Release Partnership Service – Built an ongoing partnership to iterate and test new updates

RESULTS

By implementing G2 2011 Enterprise and evaluating all the ways the Dalkia expert system could be improved, Gensym was able to significantly improve loading time and substantially reduce downtime. Today, a group of 1300 sites that previously took 3 hours to load can be loaded in 1 hour with G2 2011 Enterprise. On an even grander scale, a group of 5500 sites that once would take 13 hours to load can now be loaded in 2.5 hours, an 84% improvement.

As Dalkia continues to scale and add new sites, these results will continue to grow far beyond what was possible with the previous solution. Gensym is also helping Dalkia globalize their application (local language and unit systems) and deploy it in several countries across Europe.

Improved business continuity is the next big goal for Dalkia utilizing expertise from Gensym. For customers on G2 2011 Enterprise edition with Platinum support, Gensym has a Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery solution that Dalkia is anxious to take advantage of in order to reduce onsite costs even further in the coming year. With Gensym, Dalkia has found a long-term partner.

“Dalkia’s recent growth has been amazing, and with G2 Enterprise we are in a position to provide the high level of service our customers deserve. Optimization of our application built on G2 will allow us to reach new heights globally.”

Philippe Maine, Dalkia

Group Business Solutions Manager

www.gensym.com 401 Congress Ave. Suite 2650

Austin, Texas 78701

Page 16: About DevFactory

Ultimate SoftwareDelivering Breakthrough Products

HIGHLIGHTS

• Industry Software-as-a-Service: Global Human

Capital Management (HCM)

• Business Opportunity Align product strategy and execution

with company goals

• Solution Accept360 Suite for Enterprise Product

Portfolio Management

• Results & Bene!ts Reliable Release Forecasts and

Satis!ed Customers

CustomerUltimate Software, headquartered in Weston, Florida, is a provider of end-to-end strategic human resources, payroll, and talent management solutions to approximately 1,900 customers with an impressive retention rate of 97%. The company’s SaaS-based UltiPro solution helps businesses streamline their human capital management (HCM) operations without relying on internal IT resources.

“Accept360 is a mission

critical enterprise appli-

cation for us. We rely on

it to help transform and

run our business and

bring to market award-

winning HCM solutions.”

Business OpportunityAligning company goals to product strategyand executionUltimate Software is in a very competitive market and their continued success is fueled by relentlessly delivering new breakthrough products and incremental innovation. And they are not shy about transforming their business. A few years back their strategic initiatives were to:

• Continually evolve of their SaaS delivery model – involving a large number of software changes and other initiatives driven by requirements from all departments

• Launch new features targeted to medium sized enterprises

An exciting time, rich with promises, but also challenges. In order to meet these objectives and the associated growth goals, the entire organization had to be focused on well-delineated initiatives. Customer intimacy was critical to balance current customer priorities and deliver the right products while rapidly iterating in new market opportunities. There was no room for misalignment between departments or confusion about what to work on.

Page 17: About DevFactory

Case Study - Ultimate Software

Executives, managers and team members needed transparency over the entire product innovation process from capturing ideas from customers, to de!ning product strategy, to prioritizing product releases and backlogs, to tracking commitments through development execution. The new Product Strategy leadership group at Ultimate Software recognized this right away and took decisive action to establish a single system of record that would provide an objective framework to make product priority decisions and execute them in the context of company goals and initiatives.

Accept Solution

The Accept360 Suite: Single System of Record for Enterprise Product Portfolio Management

Ultimate Software was not just looking for a tool to improve the efficiency of their products team, they were looking for a strategic application that would give all stakeholders in the company a trusted view of what was being worked on, and why. And they wanted the system to help drive priority decisions from the perspective of company strategy.

Technology Selection

As typical of most companies, before Accept, Ultimate Software used spreadsheets and slides to track and communicate product requirements and priorities. It also did not support the factoring of strategic criteria into the process.

Several point solutions were evaluated and eliminated because they lacked the strategic perspective and analytics that Ultimate Software wanted and did not support the full innovation lifecycle process from ideation through to product delivery. Other key selection criteria were usability, reports and metrics.

Adoption

The modules of Ultimate Software’s products are very tightly integrated and with extensive dependencies, therefore they needed comprehensive visibility across all modules and teams and they needed it right away. Therefore, they decided to rollout the solution across all module teams.

“To consistently deliver

breakthrough human

capital management

solutions we need

seamless alignment

across the organization

and Accept360 has given

us the transparency we

required via a single

system of record.”

“The analytics in

Accept360 were a power-

ful surprise. We use them

to identify the items that

best match our strategic

criteria to quickly and

objectively narrow down

our choices.”

2

Page 18: About DevFactory

Case Study - Ultimate Software

Establish a Trusted System of Record

The !rst adoption wave focused on a blend of strategic and operational areas leveraging two Accept360 modules:

• Strategy and Portfolio –Strategy and portfolio managers de!ned in the system the criteria for prioritization: initiatives, themes, target markets.

• Roadmap and Requirements – The core team of business owners and product managers populated requirements and dependencies, and associate them to strategic drivers in order to manage prioritization and roadmap.

Having established a single system of record, Accept360 was opened up to all stakeholders for transparency on the entire process. Twice a quarter over 200 distributed stakeholders review and make adjustments to the roadmap priorities. Accept360 is the one version of the truth that aligns and informs all their decisions.

Engage with the Customer Community

The latest adoption wave for Ultimate Software focused on engaging with customers in a community powered by the Accept360 Ideation module. The community was launched in conjunction with the release of new product functionality and customers right away started putting comments, sharing ideas and discussing/voting each other ideas. Quickly the community grew to over 1,300 users and 350 ideas.

Results & Bene!ts

Trusted Release Forecasts and Satis!ed Customers

As a SaaS vendor, customer satisfaction and retention is of paramount importance. Accept360 has helped them transform product planning and execution into a core enterprise business process.

Everybody has visibility into the commitments and trusts the data because they have built a track record of impeccable delivery.

Ultimate Software is just at the beginning of their customer community experience, and they have already been pleasantly surprised by the impact, not only in terms of ideas submitted by customers, but also by the time savings and value of engaging customers upfront in the design of new features. Research that used to take weeks is now completed in hours or days.

“The releases planning

process is now radically

di"erent and at least

30% more e#cient. We

have 100% adoption.

Accept360 helped us

knock this critical process

out of the park.”

“We are able to forecast

our work many months

out and maintain a

uni!ed shared vision,

speaking the same lan-

guage across all levels

and departments in the

company.”

3

Page 19: About DevFactory

Case Study - Ultimate Software

Everybody hates surprises. With Accept360 Ultimate Software tracks all dependencies and associated risks. Everybody is fully aware of the impact of their work and if there is a change, the a"ected parties are immediately noti!ed and can take corrective action.

Every stakeholder across the organization at Ultimate Software now has transparency over the entire product innovation process from capturing ideas from customers, to de!ning product strategy, to prioritizing product releases and backlogs, to tracking commitments through development execution. The rules of engagement are clear, the data that drives decisions is trusted, and Ultimate Software is meeting its objectives.

“We no longer have

to second guess our

customer: they tell us

exactly what they think

and we know it right

away, every day; so we

can build the product

they want.”

Accept Corporation 3979 Freedom Circle, Suite 600 • Santa Clara, California 95054 USA • Phone: +1 866.423-8376 • Fax: +1 408.217.5101

www.accept360.com • [email protected] • UK: +44 797.444.2354 • Germany: +49 8137.9982180

About Accept Corporation Accept Corporation delivers The Product Innovation Management solution that technology-driven companies use to decide which products to bring to market for the fastest time-to-pro!t. The Accept360 Suite is the only complete end-to-end software solution that tightly links company and product strategy through ideation, portfolio planning, roadmaps, requirements and execution.  For more information, visit www.accept360.com or call us at +1.866.423.8376

©2010 Accept Corporation. Accept360 and the Accept logo are trademarks of Accept Corporation. All other trademarks, registered trademarks, and service marks are the property of their respective owners.

Rev. June 2010