Tag Archives: Technology

Converged Infrastructure: Talk by Bala Ganeshan, CTO QLogic

Live Blogging, ,

This is a live-blog of an event organized by Software Exporters Association of Pune (SEAP), in which Dr. Bala Ganeshan, Vice President and CTO of QLogic Corporation talked about Converged Infrastructure, which has also been called as Integrated Systems, or Unified Computing Systems. Specifically, he focused on the idea of having compute, storage and networking into one preconfigured package which can be delivered to the data center. This approach provides a major transition that complements the shift to cloud and virtualized computing. These trends together with new I/O centric applications and solid state storage have the potential to revolutionize computing. Many IT organizations have started using converged infrastructure for various reasons ranging from centralized management of IT resources to consolidation to lowering costs. Gartner estimated the growth by more than 50% in 2014 over 2013 to reach $6 billion. Another research firm IDC estimates that, total worldwide spending on converged infrastructure will hit $17.8 billion in 2016.

The evolution of IT infrastructure for the data center

  • Initial system implementations for “open” infrastructure were inflexible, had CPUs with limited power, networking that was slow and unreliable, and storage was captive – it wasn’t easy to share data.
  • SANs (Storage Area Networks) evolved to address these limitations. Here, the data and storage was divorced from the servers, and powerful and flexible standalone storage systems were set up that could be accessed by any servers from anywhere else on the network. But SANs are complex and expensive, required specialised skills, relative high effort to provision new infrastructure, and ended up requiring lots of efforts to manage operationally in large environments. Over time, interoperability between different pieces of the SAN became more and more difficult.
  • Converged Infrastructure was a response to the problems with SAN. The focus of the new systems was ease of use, faster time to deployment, and ease of management.

Factors that drove the disruption of SANs and IT infrastructure:

  • Web Scale: Suddenly, the requirements on the IT infrastructure grew by orders of magnitude, requiring radically different solutions and architectures
  • Open Source: Putting pressure on proprietary solutions
  • Software Defined Networking in particular, and in general Software Defined Everything
  • Storage Scale-out: more storage generated in the last 2 years than the history of computing before that.
  • Server vendors started incorporating storage in their offerings
  • Storage vendors started building intelligence and apps in their hardware

Converged Infrastructure

  • No end user specialized skills required. No zoning, no LUN masking.
  • Automated provisioning: use of single-click, drag-n-drop interfaces for creating new storage and associating it with servers and applications
  • Tightly integrated management
  • Focused on application deployment: the business doesn’t really care about disks and LUNs and servers. They care about their sales orders, and websites, and SAP instances. So all management and deployment should be in terms of the applications, and the details of the underlying infrastructure should be hidden, and automatically handled by the system
  • Combines compute, network, and storage resources
  • Improves time to deploy new applications

Not all of these goals are easy to achieve, but any progress on any of these parameters is a huge improvement.

There are three approaches to converged infrastructure.

  • SAN based infrastructure
    • Where servers and storage an infrastructure unit contains a bunch of servers and the storage is hidden under the servers, and the servers expose virtualized storage
    • This gives a flexible architecture. Servers and storage can be expanded independently
    • Reduction in OpEx
    • Management is convoluted, and is at the level of the virtualized storage
  • Appliance:
    • Here hardware appliances contain both storage as well as compute nodes
    • The convergence across appliances is provided via a software management layer
    • Provides an Application Centric view to the users
    • Fixed granularity of scale – need to add appliances; can’t scale the storage without scaling the compute, and vice versa
  • Open Source Technologies:
    • The kinds of technology being built/used by Facebook/Google
    • This is currently a small fraction of the worldwide infrastructure
      market

A lot of small startups are playing in the “Appliance” space, because the ease of management is an important consideration in the SMB market. Larger, more established companies are doing SAN based converged infrastructure.

Other Points

Here is a random collection of interesting points made during the discussion, captured in no particular order:

  • Although the impact of the cloud has been growing, enterprises have still been slow to adopt the cloud. Security is one of the problems, but also the need to move lots of data across the network is a bottleneck. So, private clouds are getting good traction; and Microsoft is one of the companies that is responding quite well to this demand.
  • For now, applications like SAP will continue to be in-house and will not easily move to the cloud. This is notwithstanding the fact that SAP does run on the cloud – it’s just not an ideal setup. Initially, the applications that are moving to the cloud are things like websites, mobile apps, and other low-hanging fruit.

Panel Discussion

There was a panel discussion on converged infrastructure. The panelists were:

  • Aalop Shah: Technical Director at Druva; handling the laptop backup product.
  • Maneesh Bhandari: Angel Investor.
  • Nitin Deshpande: President, Allscripts India.
  • Viswanthan K: Vice President, Corporate IT, APAC, at Eaton Corp
  • Yogesh Zope: Group CIO for Bharat Forge Limited, and CEO of Kalyani Technologies.

Here are some of the comments made by the panelists:

  • Yogesh: For years, different companies have called this concept by different names. And yet, it is still not something that is really useful for a company like Kalyani. Converged Infrastructure and all this flexibility might be useful for a company that needs to handle big data and lots of unpredictability as far as the storage and compute requirements are concerned, but that is not really an issue for many companies. So we’re happy with the old style infrastructure. Another important point is that the whole issue of “manageability” is more of a consideration in the west. In India, talent is much cheaper, and we don’t have the same problems.
  • Bala: The needs and the trade-offs in the Indian market might be different. While some of the problems being solved by the current players in the converged infrastructure might not be pain-point in India, there are other problems that are faced here. So while the current players are not really addressing those requirements, at some point they’ll start addressing India and then they might make inroads in the market.
  • Vish: One of the aspects of this that has not yet been addressed is the power requirements. The data-center requires a lot of power, and the requirements of a converged infrastructure data-center are unique. We (i.e. Eaton) are now playing in this space, and providing “convergence” not just at the level of the software/hardware infrastructure, but at the level of the entire physical data-center, including the power.

Barcamp Pune is Back: 27 Sept #BCP8

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What is a BarCamp

A BarCamp is an unconference. Basically, it is a crowd-sourced conference; which means that the date, time and theme of the conference are announced but the actual talks and speakers are not decided until the day of the conference itself. On the morning of the conference, a whiteboard is put up with the rooms and speaking slots, and anyone who feels like talking on any topic (that is in line with the theme of the conference) can add their topic and name to any of the open slots.

And then people are encouraged to go to any talk they find interesting, and use the “Law of Two Feet” – i.e. if a talk is not interesting, walk out, and go to the next talk, or start your own informal talk in the corridors.

What this really does is that you get a much more dynamic and diverse conference. The speakers and topics are not the same old ghisa-pita stuff – You discover new topics and new speakers and make new friends. You find enthusiastic and genuinely interested people – not corporate types who attend because their company requires them to attend.

More about Barcamp Pune

BarCamp is happening in Pune after a gap of about 6 years and we are expecting that this time around BarCamp Pune 8 will be more focused on early-stage web and mobile apps. However, the BarCamp is open for a variety of other topics, including healthcare, education, banking, real estate, Social Media, lifestyle, Auto, Aeroplanes, environment, Police, Anti-terrorism, Songs, Movies, Books, etc. Practically anything and everything under the sun (and even beyond) can be discussed in BarCamp.

What Should you expect?

Apart from networking and meeting people from various walks of life in different sectors, a BarCamp is probably the only place where ideas evolve during the course of the event. Nothing is planned in a BarCamp – Every participant has right to talk on the subject they love (and think that others may also like). While this format can be chaotic sometimes, it also opens doors to something you may never have known or been exposed to in an event.

And yes, BMC Software, the place where we are hosting the event have sponsored us with Free Lunch and beverages.

BCP8 Details

  • Where: BMC Software, Wing 1, Tower ‘B’, Business Bay, Airport Road, Yerwada, Pune
  • When: 27th Sep 2014 (Saturday) 10:00 to 5:00pm
  • *Map: http://bit.ly/BarCampPune8

Venue Instructions

BMC Software office is based in a large complex and the participants of the event need to follow certain rules and regulations. Please read below carefully.

  • While arriving from Yerwada, the venue is on your right and if you are coming from Airport it is on your left.
  • When you reach the building, use gate #3 to go to Parking level 2.
  • 2 wheelers & 4 wheelers must enter through Gate #3
  • Pedestrians can enter through Gate#3 or Gate #4
  • Tell the security you are going to “Barcamp at BMC software”

Keep in Mind

  • Being an IT company, registration is important
  • To facilitate that, online registration for the event is a MUST
  • Due to security reasons, you’ll be asked to provide laptop serial number etc. at reception. Do not carry if not necessary
  • If you want to talk on something and need presentation, do carry your own laptop.
  • Internet connections will NOT be provided by the organizers or venue sponsor. Make your own arrangements or talk to volunteers in advance
  • Event will be on 4th floor & lunch will be served on 5th floor
  • Entry will not be allowed on any other floor apart from 4th & 5th

Fees and Registration

This event is free and open for anybody to attend. However Please register here: http://bcp8.explara.com/

“What High Tech Marketing is … and isn’t” excerpts from book published by Pune’s @AbhijitAthavale

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(Recently, Pune-based Abhijit Athavale, Founder of Markonix, a technology marketing and learning development company with deep roots in Silicon Valley, wrote a book called “The Edge of Zero: High Tech Marketing in the Age of Falling Growth”, with co-author Peter Gasperini. We invited Abhijit to give us a short write-up about the book and an excerpt from the book, for the benefit of PuneTech readers.)

What High Tech Marketing is … and isn’t

Many industries suffer from an incomplete understanding of what purpose Marketing actually serves. High Tech has been amongst the worst offenders in this, and the misconceptions of Marketing’s role and domain in the Technology business has persisted in various forms and levels of severity for all of the industry’s 40+ years. Internal characterizations of Marketing’s domain tend to inexorably converge on the following set of simple descriptions:

  • “Marketing is Sales”
  • “Marketing is Customer Service”
  • “Marketing manages Programs”
  • “Marketing runs Promotions and Ads”
  • “Marketing controls Pricing”

The insidiously deceptive factor common to the above statements is that they are all true – in part.

Does the above list encompass everything Marketing is supposed to do? Actually, NO. Operations and Engineering are quite correct in their assumptions that Marketing is the proper organization for handling the above mentioned problem areas. But there is much more to the proper practice of Marketing for High Tech than what was mentioned above.

It is a very broad field requiring depth and experience in both hard and soft disciplines, purely engineering and purely business fields, and both technical and customer interaction skillsets. And since these factors influence and interleave with each other, professionally complete High Tech marketers need to be able to swim these clashing currents without being pulled under or swept off to the side.

Marketing is, fundamentally, a LEADERSHIP role. The very act of initiating a Marketing plan to execute the strategy for a company and its products means identifying the Value propositions which will make a firm’s offerings compelling to its target market. This means a high Tech marketer must be able to simultaneously grasp the potential of the company’s engineering team, the aptitude of its operations arm, the expectations, desires and dreams of its customers, and the capacity of its sales force. When a Marketing plan is formulated correctly, an enterprise will have the knowledge to develop the kinds of products its customers will happily buy, which the factory can skillfully build, and the sales force can readily sell.

Our new book, ‘The Edge of Zero’ discusses challenges of high tech Marketing in the age of falling growth. Here’s an excerpt from ‘What Makes a Good Marketer’ chapter:

Crossfire – An excerpt from The Edge of Zero

If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottages princes’ palaces. – Shakespeare, ‘The Merchant of Venice’

Marketers in High Tech can be overwhelmed by the 180 degree contradictions between the needs and desires of the Field and the Factory, especially at the junior level. Unfortunately, many choose the simplicity and expediency of picking a side. A technically oriented marketer will feel more drawn to their comfort zone thru siding with the Factory, whereas a more socially oriented or less technically savvy marketer will tend to gravitate towards the Field.

Either choice is extraordinarily destructive to the business as a whole. Borrowing liberally from basic Physics principles, one could make the analogy that Conservation of Energy – every action causes an equal and opposite reaction – takes hold in such companies in a very negative aspect, with long term crippling effects. By choosing a side, a Marketer reinforces and exacerbates any existing antagonism between the two warring camps.

A Marketer that fulfills his role properly is supposed to straddle the fence between Order and Chaos, reconciling them without forcing a damaging compromise on either. It’s no easy task, but skirting the challenge in favor of the easier path of taking sides creates a schism right down the center of the enterprise. It embeds conflict, distrust and friction between the Factory and Field, which ultimately translates into a complete disconnect between a company and its customers.

It boils down to a loss of vital information. The Factory cannot design and build good products and solutions in a vacuum, but can hardly expect to gain insight into customer concerns, difficulties and aspirations if the company salesmen are unable to deliver valued solutions and support from the Factory to those customers, building the foundation for a long term relationship of communication, trust and mutual support. If the Factory and the Field are divided, the enterprise is choosing a path of creating successful products by a combination of learning thru serial failures and hoping to come up with a lucky choice of feature sets along the way. In the end, this is like jumping out a plane without a parachute, hoping to find someone who is more thoughtfully equipped on the way down.
You can look inside the book here before buying a copy.

About the Author – Abhijit Athavale

Abhijit Athavale was born in Pune, India. He moved to the US for further education and lived and worked in the Silicon Valley before returning to Pune. He still lives in the same house on the same street. He has diverse interests – from hi-tech marketing to sports to WWII era history and mysteries and likes to read and write about them.

Abhijit studied Electricial Engineering in COEP, followed by a Masters in Texas A&M University, after which he spent 11+ years, ending as Senior Marketing Manager at Xilinx, developing the marketing strategy for their $150MM+ Xilinx Connectivity solution – including messaging, value proposition development and product positioning.

More recently, Abhijit has helping evangelize and market new technologies Markonix, a company he founded with the idea of helping lower the cost of marketing and learning for businesses worldwide.

Abhijit also founded and runs PuneChips, one of the technology community platform incubated by PuneTech. PuneChips is a network for Semiconductor, EDA and Embedded Systems professionals in the Pune (India) area. PuneChips provides networking and learning opportunities from Industry mavens to its members.

For more details see his Linkedin profile or follow him on twitter

Event: Applications of Machine Learning – with @BMCSoftware, @Helpshift, @Sokrati, @Pubmatic – 5 July

Events, Featured, , ,

HasGeek has arranged a day-long set of talks on the Applications of Machine Learning on 5th July, in Pune.

This should be a great event, and a must attend for anyone in Pune who has even a passing interest in machine learning and advanced technologies. Not only are the talks from a very diverse set of domains, giving you an idea of different ways in which machine learning can be used, but the set of speakers who’re talking are from some of Pune’s most interesting companies: Helpshift, Sokrati, Pubmatic, AlgoAnalytics, BMC.

The event is on 5th July, from 11am to 5pm, at Thoughtworks Pune. Please register now because the venue has limited seating, and I am sure with the topic selected and the quality of talks and speakers, the event will be overbooked. (In fact, if we manage to overbook the event soon, we can try to get the organizers to shift the event to a bigger venue…)

Here are the details of the talks

Grouping similar messages using Topic modeling

In machine learning and natural language processing, a topic model is a type of statistical model for discovering abstract “topics” that occur in a collection of documents. At Helpshift, we get a lot of customer support messages. We use topic modelling and more specifically the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), to classify similar message automatically based on messages. These grouped messages can be processed by the CS personnel making them more efficient.
This talk will cover Helpshift’s experience and the challenges in using LDA for grouping similar messages without any prior knowledge.

Speaker – Vinayak Hegde

Vinayak Hegde is VP of Engineering at Helpshift. In the past, he has worked at Inmobi, Akamai and Microsoft.

Twitter: @vinayakh

The Cookie as a Customer: An E-commerce Perspective

In the brick and mortar days, the shopkeeper interacted with a live human customer with appearance, expressions and behavioural traits. These attributes influenced the way the shopkeeper pitched his goods. Flip to the current e-commerce world where you are interacting with a cookie which was dropped when a customer visited your website. How does an e-commerce store know the appearance, expressions and behavioural traits of a customer? Based on those characteristics, how does the sales pitch change? Where do these conversations happen?
In this session, Rahul Kulkarni demonstrates with real-world examples how big data from cookies translates into appearance, expressions and behavioural traits of the customer, and most importantly how these are used to make a killer sales pitch for the customer.

Speaker – Rahul Kulkarni

Rahul Kulkarni is the CPO of Sokrati and has been ex-Googler. Linkedin

Application of Machine Learning for Financial Markets prediction

This session covers case studies which use some of the classical as well as cutting-edge machine learning algorithms. Due to ill-conditioning and noisy nature of financial data, there are some unique characteristics of this problem that we will focus on. Robustness of modelling methodology, averaging of models, identifying what is true improvement in prediction accuracy versus over-fitting become some of the serious issues people will need look into.

Speaker – Aniruddha Pant

Aniruddha Pant is the founder and CEO of AlgoAnalytics. LinkedIn

Machine Learning in Online Advertising Domain

In online advertising domain, there are various players which play a different role working on behalf of either publisher or advertiser, directly or indirectly. These players interact with each other in real-time to select the best advertisement optimizing their individual goals. Sreekanth Vempati will present key optimization and real-time impression allocation challenges solved using Machine Learning by different players in the advertising echo system.
As a part of this talk, he will present broadly about PubMatic’s work with Machine Learning and their applications. Specifically, Sreekanth will show some of the Machine Learning applications in online advertising domain, showcasing some of the problems that are being solved in PubMatic.

Speaker – Sreekanth Vempati

Sreekanth Vempati is the Team Lead of Machine Learning & Algorithms at PubMatic. LinkedIn

Text Analytics helping IT management get smarter

In this talk, Nilesh Phadke will discuss Text Analytics and how it can be used for better IT management. The talk will cover an Introduction to Text Analytics, going over the basics of what is meant by Text Analytics followed by some of the key techniques involved in Text Analytics and how these techniques can be used to improve IT management solutions.

Speaker – Nilesh Phadke

Nilesh Phadke is the Lead Product Developer at BMC Incubator Lab. He is working on using machine learning techniques for solving problems in the ITSM domain. Linkedin

Fees and Registration

This event is free and open for anybody to attend. Please register here: https://fifthelephant.in/2014/machine-learning-pune

Please double-check the date/time/venue of the event at the above link. We try to ensure that PuneTech calendar listings are accurate, but occasional errors creep in.

About the PuneTech Calendar

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DrupalCamp Pune on 5/6 April; Call for Speakers is open

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The Drupal Community in Pune presents DrupalCamp Pune on 5/6 April 2014, a conference for Drupal developers and users. This is a free conference, and open for anybody with an interest in Drupal in particular, or web development / PHP in particular.

Call for papers

DrupalCamp would love to get your proposals for sessions to be delivered in Drupal Camp Pune. You may select any topic from development, design or anything interesting that you would like to share. Last date for submitting your proposal is 27th March, 2014.

Call for papers: http://camp2014.punedrupalgroup.com/session/add

DrupalCamp Background

Drupal in Pune started back in February 2009 as Pune Drupal User Group (PDRUG), with an objective to strengthen the local Drupal community in Pune. The first meetup saw 3 Drupalers, in last year we have been able to engage Drupalers in monthly code sprints where focus is on on D8 core contributions. In addition to code sprints, Pune community has also organised global training days and specialized workshops for Pune colleges.

The first Drupal Camp Pune was organized back in 2009. In this first camp there were 300+ attendees. One of the fun highlights of the Drupal Camp Pune 2009 was the Drupal Song which featured in Dries’s blog :), we soon followed up Drupal Day/Hackathon in presence of Addison Berry (former documentation lead, Drupal). Between 2010 and 2014, Drupal community has been focusing on a lot of Drupal meet ups and now its time to have a bigger event: “Drupal Camp Pune 2014.”

What to expect?

In Drupal Camp Pune 2014 you will meet some of the earliest contributors to Drupal in India from around the country. For developers and students, the event presents opportunities for learning, getting involved in community contributions via code/ review/ QA for Drupal 8. One of the main objective of this camp is to engage students more personally in a ladder like workshop. For the business community there will be an opportunity for learning from sessions based on case studies of Drupal websites, meeting representatives of the leading Drupal companies in India, and some of the brightest individuals working on Drupal.

What should I bring to Pune Drupal Camp?

Just come with Open mind and laptop with Drupal 7 installation. You can follow instruction over here.

Keynote – Jacob Singh

Jacob is the country head for Acquia India where he manages all alliances, business development and services in the region. He is an experienced trainer, project manager, developer and scrum-master with 14 years of experience building great web experiences, seven with Drupal.

One of the early Acquians (2008), Jacob holds the distinction of working in the most departments. He has been an integral part of the Acquia Search and Drupal Gardens products, a recognized Drupal trainer and consultant and a solution architect.

Important dates:

  • Call for Papers starts on 12th March, 2014 and ends on 27th March, 2014
  • List of Accepted sessions to be announced on 29th March, 2014
  • Actual event is on 5th and 6th April

Call for Sponsors

Not only does a platform like Drupal Camp make the community stronger, but it also contributes to grow economic ecosystem. By Sponsoring Drupal camp you show your commitment to Drupal and the community at large.

Become a sponsor: http://camp2014.punedrupalgroup.com/sponsor-camp

Fees and Registration

This event is free and open for anybody to attend. Please register here: http://camp2014.punedrupalgroup.com/user/register

Event website: http://camp2014.punedrupalgroup.com/

Please double-check the date/time/venue of the event at the above link. We try to ensure that PuneTech calendar listings are accurate, but occasional errors creep in.

Pune has more tech and startup events each month than there are days in the month. Because of the large volume, information about most of our events is not posted to the PuneTech blog – they directly go to the PuneTech Calendar. Please sign up to get event announcements by email. Click here to subscribe (free), or follow @punetech on twitter.

Call for Proposals: Pune Scala Symposium 12 April

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On April 12th, Thoughtworks Pune will play host to a day-long conference on Scala in Pune, and the call for proposals is now up. Here are some examples of topics that you can submit talks on:

  • experience reports from commercial projects (what worked, what did not and insights from implementing Scala on the project)
  • experience reports contributing to open source projects or consulting projects
  • demo/introduction to a library/tool/framework/technique

Propose a session now!

If your talk gets accepted, ThoughtWorks will sponsor your travel (domestic) and stay.

Who should attend:

If you are an existing user of Scala or other functional programming languages or if you are curious to know more about Scala and want to find out how other companies are using Scala, come join the Pune Scala Symposium. You will get to meet Scala enthusiasts from across India, discuss and learn from each other.

Venue:

ThoughtWorks India Pvt Ltd, 6th Floor, Binarius Building, Deepak Complex, National Games Road, Beside Sales Tax Office, Shastrinagar, Yerwada, Pune.

Follow @punescala on twitter, and join in the conversation using #punescala.

Fees and Registration

This event is free and open for anybody to attend. Please register here: http://info.thoughtworks.com/pune-scala-symposium-april-12-registration.html.

Food and refreshment drinks will be provided. Attendance is free of charge. Seats are limited, so sign up now!

If you have any questions write to punescala@thoughtworks.com or you can reach out to Mushtaq Ahmed on +919850099687.

LiveBlog: Intelligence at the Edge

Live Blogging, , , , , ,

This is a live-blog of the event organized by @NexusVP, with the CTOs of @DruvaInc, @Helpshift, and @Uniken_Inc, talking about “Intelligence at the Edge” – i.e. the increasing amount of enterprise data that is now found in mobiles, laptops, and other devices of their employees, and how that is changing the world of enterprise software.

The panel consisted of these people:

  • Jishnu Bhattacharjee (@b_jishnu), of Nexus Venture Partners:
  • Sanjay Deshpande, CEO and Chief Innovation Officer at Uniken, a Pune-based enterprise security company.
  • BG (@ghoseb), CTO and Co-founder at Helpshift, a Pune-based company that provides a software platform that allows mobile app developers to incorporate high quality customer service and support into their apps.
  • Milind Borate, CTO and Co-Founder at Druva, a Pune-based company that provides backup solutions for the enterprise.

Here is a random list of interesting stuff said during this discussion:

  • More and more data and intelligence is being pushed at the edges of the corporate networks. Translation: Imagine a large company. It has an IT department that runs many servers and complicated applications in their labs and data centers. In the past, most of the data and intelligence of the enterprise was in these servers. But in recent times, the devices in the hands of the employees (the desktops, laptops, mobile phones) have more and more powerful apps, more sensitive data, and more unique data (i.e. data which is not replicated on the servers). This is the “edge” of the enterprise.
  • What does Druva do? Druva looks at data that is sitting on laptops, mobiles, and other devices at the edge from 4 different angles:
    • Backup of the data
    • Data theft prevention if the data falls in the wrong hands
    • Analyzing the data on all these devices and providing intelligence (actionable insights)

    • Being able to share that data with others: colleagues within the company, but also outside – customers, vendors

  • What does Helpshift do? Built a SDK that mobile developers can download and incorporate into their app to automatically and easily get very sophisticated customer service into their app. For example:
    • Reduce customer service calls through the use of in-app FAQs, which can easily be updated by the developer – updates to the FAQ can be pushed to all customers mobiles automatically
    • When a customer reports an issue, the Helpshift runtime uses breadcrumbs to keep track of what the customer was doing just before hitting the issue, so that without any extra effort on the part of the customer, details of the device, the configuration and what exactly caused the bug are sent to the server
    • Now they are focusing on building machine-learning based higher level features. Their bigger customers have millions of daily users and get thousands of support issues per day. So, they need sophisticated analysis to figure out the common patterns.
    • 80% of Helpshift’s market is the US and the remaining 20% is from the rest of the world, including Europe and Latin America
    • 80% of the money comes from iPhone users. But Android is still young, and growing.
  • What does Uniken do? Uniken realized that most of the technology on the internet has been driven by media companies who want to sell ads on their websites, and maximize the number of users, whereas enterprises (like banks) are trying to use the same internet to give a very secure experience to their (captive) users. There is a mismatch here, and what the enterprises need is a much more secure environment where they have much more control over all the pieces in the chain – including the network and the devices being used by the customers. This is the area Uniken is in.
  • Indian market vs US market: In India, there is a software/web/mobile market, but a lot of it is mostly consumer oriented. The B2B software market is still not really well developed, and is it not easy to make much money here.
    • 60% of Druva’s revenue comes from the US, 30% from Europe, and 10% comes from the rest of the world (India included).
    • Druva started off trying to sell in the Indian market. They tried in-person enterprise sales, and had a tough time. In the meantime, they started getting enquiries from the US from people who had simply downloaded their software, tried it out, liked it, and wanted to buy it. Over time, this increased, and they soon realized that US was where the real market was.
    • One of the key things that helped them was that they built software that was very easy to download off the web and install without requiring any help from the company itself. This was unheard of in the enterprise backup business (which was dominated by companies like Symantec/Veritas, EMC etc.)
    • Druva used Google adwords very effectively to market its products. The big players like Symantec/Veritas, EMC have very large sales organizations with great reach, and it would have been very difficult for Druva to compete with them in terms of reach of their salespeople. But Google adwords allowed them to reach out to customers all over the world.
  • BigData is big. The number of devices (mobiles, laptops, desktops) that people are using is so huge, that with even minimal intelligence in each device the amount of data is huge – petabytes.
    • Collect as much data as possible. You will find uses for it later.
    • Don’t worry about where/how to store the data. Just store it in flat files initially, and then later you can figure out where to put it to analyze it.
    • No single software will solve all your problems. Use everything – SQL, NoSQL, Hadoop, etc.
    • What has made this possible is the fact that all these devices are now internet connected, and hence all the data can be collected and stored centrally in the cloud. Further, again because of the internet connectivity, it is possible to push software updates to the devices, so the data collection abilities can be continuously upgraded.
  • How has Uniken managed to sell into the Indian enterprise market? It is currently 100% in the Indian market – and it sees India as a big market, with lots of potential. Most Indian software startups struggle with this (as seen by Druva’s experience above). You need to do this:
    • In any company, identify the right person – the one who has enough vision to do things differently, try new products, and who can also get things done in that company
    • Choosing the right champion in the customer company is key
    • Keep meeting the right people, keep selling them your story, keep plugging away, until the sale happens
    • Think of an enterprise sale as dating with a long-term relationship in mind
    • Have lots of patience. Don’t give up. India is a market requires a lot of patience.

Panel Discussion: Intelligence at the Edge with @DruvaInc @Helpshift @Uniken_Inc and @nexusvp

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Nexus Venture Partners is one of India’s top technology venture capital firms, and has invested in 4 of Pune’s top technology startups: Druva, Helpshift, Pubmatic and Uniken.

On 13th February, Nexus is hosting a panel discussion on the topic “Intelligence at the edge”. With the CTOs of Druva and Helpshift, and the CEO of Uniken as panelists, it promises to be a great event that every techie in Pune who’s interested in the future of technology must attend.

Detailed Program:
– 6 – 6:30pm: Introductions
– 6:30 – 7:30pm: Panel Discussion.
– Panel Moderator:
– Jishnu Bhattacharjee, MD, Nexus Venture Partners
– Panelists:
– Milind Borate, Co-founder & CTO, Druva
– Baishampayan Ghose, Co-founder & CTO, Helpshift
– Sanjay Deshpande, Chief Innovation Officer & CEO, Uniken
– 7:30 – 8pm: Q & A
– 8 – 9pm: Networking over dinner

Fees and Registration

The event is on 13th February, from 6pm to 9pm, at Sumant Moolgaokar Auditorium, MCCIA, ICC Trade Towers, SB Road. The event is free and open for anybody to attend. Please register here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/16L17gU5zTGPFtfIxQWymz5tJWqcfzG3IsWvdeIag5DA/viewform

Please double-check the date/time/venue of the event at the above link. We try to ensure that PuneTech calendar listings are accurate, but occasional errors creep in.

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TechForSeva: Technology for the Bottom-of-the-Pyramid: 2-day-conference

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VijnanaBharati.org, Seva Sahyog, Maharshi Karve Stree Shikshan Sanstha (MKSSS) and MCCIA, are pursuing a new initiative called Tech for Seva under the leadership of stalwarts like Dr. Anil Kakodkar, Dr F C Kohli, Dr. Raghunath Mashelkar, Dr. Jagannath Wani, Dr. Vijay Bhatkar and many more.

Tech for Seva is a platform allowing academic & research institutions, individual & corporate innovators, NGOs & grass root operators to come together on a common platform and share their success stories and problems that need scientific solutions to help the bottom of the pyramid of our country to share the fruits of development.

Please visit the web site for more details.

This is a two day conference in Pune on 28th & 29th September 2013 where all the three stakeholders i.e. innovators, corporates & NGOs will jointly share their success stories, problems and will try to come up with some partnership proposals.

This platform will be an ongoing activity even after the conference is over and will be monitored by a special task force set up by Tech for Seva.

The topics chosen for deliberations / presentation are education, health,livelihood and environment.

The topic of Environment is further classified as energy, water, waste management and bio-diversity.

A grand expo, “Padma Vibhushan Dr.Verghese Kurien Expo”, student competition, “IET TFS Student Competition of Innovative Ideas”, and Leadership dinner will be major highlights of the conference.

In TFS expo individuals/institutes/VOs/NGOs/corporates will showcase their equipments, prototypes, models, products, processes and information about the schemes/programs, success stories, etc. for the delegates and other stake holders.

Event website: http://techforseva.org

Please double-check the date/time/venue of the event at the above link. We try to ensure that PuneTech calendar listings are accurate, but occasional errors creep in.

(We do not post all tech events in Pune to the PuneTech blog. Many other events are listed on the PuneTech Calendar. To ensure that you do not miss the other events, subscribe for announcements by email. Click here to subscribe (free) to the PuneTech Calendar of events.)

11 Tech/Startup Events in Pune this weekend

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If you’re not subscribed to the PuneTech Calendar, you might not have realized that this weekend is packed with tech and/or startup events in Pune – 11, in fact.

Unless otherwise specified, these events are free and open to anybody who’s interested in attending. A few are paid events, and this is clearly mentioned below.

Here’s a quick overview. To get more details about any event – including venue, time and registration information, go to PuneTech Calendar and click on the event link.

Friday, 23 August, evening

  • 6:30pm: TiE Pune Event – A New Model of Leadership

Saturday, 24 August

  • Pune’s Microsoft Technologies User Group – PUG has a 2 day DevCon that kicks off on Saturday morning and continues on until Sunday evening.
  • A 2 day free Clojure workshop by Baishampayan Ghose of Helpshift at BMC Software. Unfortunately, this workshop had limited seats and got full almost immediately after being announced. They are hoping to have more such workshops in the future. Make sure you’re subscribed to the PuneTech Calendar so you don’t miss the announcement.
  • RailsGirlsPune – a One Day Ruby-on-Rails workshop for Women
  • A Paid Sales and Marketing Beginners Workshop for Entrepreneurs
  • Part 2 of a Workshop on Big Data with Hadoop
  • A Paid Hands-On workshop on the GIT distributed version control system
  • Part 3 of A Hands-On Session for Amazon AWS Developers
  • SAP HANA get-together

Sunday, 25 August

  • A meetup of everybody interested in the Corona SDK (a leading mobile development framework)
  • Internet-of-things Meetup: Hands-on with Beagle Bone Black + Python + OpenCV

To get more details about any event – including venue, time and registration information, go to PuneTech Calendar and click on the event link.

About the PuneTech Calendar

If you got this update in your email or RSS feed, but you did not see any of the above events, that means that you’re subscribed to the PuneTech main blog, but you are not subscribed to the PuneTech events calendar. Since there are many tech events happening in Pune, we don’t put all the event announcements on the main blog. Hence, if you’re interested in attending events, you should subscribe to
get event announcements by email. Click here to subscribe (free) to the PuneTech Calendar of events.