Monthly Archives: December 2011

Event Report: IndicThreads Java Conference 2011

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(This article about the IndicThreads Java Conference 2011 was written by Abhay Bakshi for DZone. It has been re-published here with permission for the benefit of PuneTech readers.)

Attending a conference (probably as renowned and as recognized as the Java conference by IndicThreads) adds to your muscle – Period. By the way, I have picked up from the same thread — same tone and similar spirit — from March 2011. IndicThreads held the Q11 conference then, which I had a chance to attend and then write a short report on for DZone. If you attended IndicThreads conferences before, your feedback is also welcome — through your blogs or through places like this report hosting page.

Now, you may ask – How Was the Environment This Time?

First and foremost, I would like to say this — you could feel the thought process from Harshad Oak (Owner – IndicThreads – Conference Organizer) all throughout the conference. When I attended the conference sessions, I could see that one presentation simply led to another one. And somehow I could also relate this fact to the earlier Q11 conference; and could see the passion that Harshad has when he arranges these events.

Just as a side note – Harshad is the first Java champion in India and he continues to serve the IT community. He is ably supported by his wife Sangeeta Oak in these endeavors. This young couple gives a lot of attention to detail for the events!

The Conference Agenda in short

The conference agenda included the following topics (Friday/Saturday — Dec 02/03):

  • The Java Report (Harshad Oak)
  • Scalability Considerations (Yogesh Deshpande)
  • PaaSing a Java EE 6 Application (Kshitiz Saxena)
  • Solr as your Search and Suggest Engine (Karan Nangru)
  • Testing Concurrent Java Programs (Sameer Arora)
  • Scala Collections: Expressivity and Brevity upgrade from Java (Dhananjay Nene)
  • REST Style Web Services – Google Protocol Buffers (Prasad Nirantar)
  • Java EE 7 Platform: Developing for the Cloud (Kshitiz Saxena – yes again! He has awesome topic coverage.)
  • Building Massively Scalable Applications with Akka (Vikas Hazrati)
  • Simplifying builds with Gradle (Saager Mhatre)
  • Using Scala for Building DSLs (Abhijit Sharma)

The presentation slides are hosted at http://j11.indicthreads.com/slides

My Thoughts on the Agenda

On the first day of the conference, I noticed that there are 7 sessions to attend on Friday and 4 more sessions on Saturday. Frankly, I thought there was some kind of mismatch in arranging these sessions. But my opinion changed as the conference went on from Friday into Saturday. The next day was intentionally kept lighter. As an attendee, I now think that your mind probably absorbs and retains more information during the initial parts of a conference. I believe that IndicThreads is getting better overall conference after conference.

What I Wanted to Get from Each Session

I planned on getting 3 things from the sessions (that was my ROI!) — first, how the knowledge earned will apply towards the business domain at my work place; second, my personal interactions with the speaker(s) from networking perspectives; and third, how I can help Harshad and his team and provide helpful feedback. Even with events like NFJS, TSSS in USA, I always received and offered my best to organizers Jay Zimmerman, Floyd Marinescu et al.

I should also mention, I still remember Rick Ross’ keynote speech at TSSS and how it was inspirational to many of us there. Point is that industry leaders like Harshad, Rick, Floyd (and of course some more) are doing everything to lead developers all across the world to be better IT professionals. Sometimes they pay from their own pockets to see results.

The Actual Sessions

I am not going to cover all the details from all the talks, well, it’s not possible. The slides are available for entire content.

The Java Report

In the keynote speech, Harshad mentioned that things moved very rapidly after Sun was purchased by Oracle. He later encouraged participants to have a look at topics such as Java EE 6 Web Profile, Java FX 2.0 (all Java), Java EE 7 and a few more. Harshad raised a point – do you as a Java expert look the same “sexy” today as you did when Java started? The answer is “less sexy”. He also said that Java ME was not offering many new things for quite a while now.

Scalability Considerations

Yogesh covered Vertical Scaling and Horizontal Scaling, and principles behind both techniques. He backed up his presentation with a helpful case study.

PaaSing a Java EE 6 Application

Kshitiz works at Sun/Oracle for last 10 years. He explained PaaS in simpler terms. It was very important to keep things simple. The speech was well accepted by the audience. Just as I was putting this article together, I saw that Javalobby had published a fresh article on PaaS 2.0 — it looks quite relevant to our discussion.

Solr as Your Search and Suggest Engine

It was very good to learn from Karan about Embedded Solr Server versus Commons Http Solr Server, and the various “search” and “suggestion” cases. Karan is quite passionate about Solr.

Testing Concurrent Java Programs

I don’t develop as much concurrent Java code at work as I do some other pieces; but learning from Sameer clicked a few ideas in my mind for a business case that we have at work. We (AEGIS) do some case executions in our workflow, and ideas from concurrency can be applied to what we do. By the way, for the intense session that we had with Sameer, fortunately, there was a coffee break after the session. Hats off to Sameer for how much he knows about this topic.

Scala Collections – Expressivity and Brevity upgrade from Java

Although Dhananjay knew a lot, he was addressing a very specific topic “Collections”. To me, the topic could have been broader (or be split in two sessions). Scala is a powerful language and initial learning curve looks longer for a beginner. I should mention that Dhananjay preferred IntelliJ for Scala-based development — rightfully so.

REST Style Web Services – Google Protocol Buffers

Prasad (speaker) has a background from Akron, Ohio (M.S.). He compared content negotiation techniques (JSON, XML, and Portable Binary Content) with focus on Google Protocol Buffers. His comparison of Google Protocol Buffers with Apache Avro was very apt.

Java EE 7 Platform: Developing for the Cloud

Kshitiz explained the terms IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. There are vendors other than Sun that offer PaaS support — but standards are lacking. He explained Java EE 7 focus on PaaS – Elasticity which has progressed from single node implementation to multi-node multi-instance clustering to SLA driven Elasticity. Refer the slides for more details.

Building Massively Scalable Applications with Akka

Vikas writes for InfoQ. He said that if you wanted to learn Akka, then you needed to keep in mind that Akka was designed to make developer’s life easier by addressing concurrency, scalability and fault-tolerance in applications. The founder of Akka is Jonas Boner, and I find Jonas’ article on Akka hosted by Javalobby at this page. As per Vikas, Akka is good for event-based systems, whereas Hadoop for batch-based systems.

Simplifying Builds (Build Scripts) with Gradle

An excellent slide presentation and visual illustrations by Saager. He corrected the name of the topic to “Simplifying build scripts..”. He compared Gradle with Ant and Maven, and mentioned that Gradle describes builds with only as much text as is absolutely necessary.

Using Scala for Building DSLs

This was the only session where there were no questions from the audience! From Abhijit’s (speaker) angle, it was a bit uncomfortable feeling; but I later mentioned to him that the presentation was so straight-forward (note – not an easy compilation) and neatly arranged, the questions were answered even before they were asked. I recommend – just download the presentation, and you will get to see what I mean. Good to learn about Scala in this domain.

Every session was little over an hour. And all speakers covered their sessions very well.

Past Reviews of IndicThreads Conference on Java

Some of the celebrity authors and speakers like Arun Gupta and Vikas Hazrati have reviewed their prior Java IndicThreads conference experiences by writing articles on their respective blogs (you may access the reviews: Arun, Vikas). It is rewarding to learn from such experts in the field.

Lastly, about the Food and Quizzes and Prizes!

I believe, Sangeeta made awesome choices for food at lunch and the breaks! As well as, she put up short quizzes and announced prizes in different categories. IndicThreads have maintained the “Green” theme and I won a prize in that category.

My Top Three Take-away Points

My top three take away points from J11 are – rejuvenating yourself by looking at technical topics from speakers’/attendees’ eyes and adding to your knowledge, networking with experts so that you can offer your best and receive the best from them, and just knowing where the Java industry stands today.

Conclusion

There was an “Unconference” session, where everybody who participated voiced a need for the Java groups in the city to come together. I get a feel that awareness in the industry about such conferences is increasing, and demand for such speakers and quality offered by these conferences is going to increase in few more short years.

Harshad encourages local speakers to come out and respond to the RFPs (and participate). For those who only want to attend can also win a FREE pass to the conference! All in all, it was worth attending the Java conference by IndicThreads.

Faster-than-light camera invented by MIT’s Ramesh Raskar (ex-Punekar)

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Actually, the headline of this article contains a number of inaccuracies. First, the research is just by Ramesh Raskar, but is the work of a group of people, and Ramesh Raskar, Associated Professor at MIT’s Media Lab, and Director of the Camera Culture Group is one of the people in the group. Second, the camera (like everything else in the universe) is not faster than light; but what it does to is simulate the capture of a scene at trillions of frames per second, thus allowing it to capture things like light passing across a scene. Also, because of confusions in the past, I need to point out that we’re talking about the MIT in USA.

More details on the invention (which is actually done by cleverly bending light and then analyzing the results with a computer) can be found here

In any case, the question is, why is this article on PuneTech? Yes, Raskar is a Punekar – he did is engineering in COEP. However, so what? I am against the idea of Indians getting very excited about major achievements by people who grew up here, but really blossomed in environments outside of India.

However, Raskar continues to be relevant to Pune for the following reasons:

The last one I see as the most important, and far-reaching. Specifically, Dr. Raskar is interested in collaborating with individuals, entrepreneurs, companies, or institutions on at least two of his projects, if not more. Here are details:

  • He is hoping to see that his EyeNetra invention reaches the maximum number of people in India – specially rural India. EyeNetra is the handheld, android-based, cheap device to detect vision problems including lens prescription, astigmatism, and cataract. Raskar is looking to collaborate with someone in India who can make this happen – either as a for-profit enterprise, or as a social enterprise. For more details see this PuneTech post
  • He is hoping that some day, an event similar to MIT’s $100k Entrepreneurship Competition can be created in Pune in particular, or India in general. If there is someone here who can pull this off, Raskar would be able to support the initiative in various ways – including being involved himself, and trying to get people or groups from MIT to also be involved in some way.

Get in touch with Dr. Ramesh Raskar at: raskar@mit.edu (or get in touch with us, and we can introduce you).

Advantage Pune Panel Discussion: Opportunities for Pune to become an Innovation Hub

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These are a few quick ‘n dirty notes captured during a Panel Discussion that was held as a part of the “Global Conclave: Advantage Pune” event held in Pune yesterday, organized by Zinnov and Software Exporters Association of Pune (SEAP). The panel discussion was on the topic “Opportunities and Challenges for Pune to become an Innovation Hub”. The panelists were:

  • Bhavani Shankar from Zinnov
  • Akila Krishnakumar head of Sungard India
  • Ashish Deshpande from Google (based in Pune)
  • Kiran Gadi head of Motorola Mobility India
  • Omkar Nimbalkar head of Tivoli Group IBM India
  • Tarun Sharma head of BMC India

Overall, a few themes that most people touched upon were these:

  • Pune isn’t just about software. It has automotive, manufacturing, sciences (for example, NCL), and other things going for it. So it is more rounded than other cities
  • Pune has great climate
  • Pune has lots of educational instiutions
  • Pune is still not as crowded as Bangalore, so growth is still possible in Pune.

Overall, these are the advantages that Pune has for driving innovation.

Here are some additional interesting points made by the panelists:

  • [Akila] Sungard is probably one of the earliest Software Product MNCs to set up in Pune (back in 1993). Pune has 20% of Sungard’s global R&D strength. BFSI is the biggest market for the software sector, and hence a lot of innovation in Pune’s software industry has to happen (will happen) in this space
  • [Kiran] Our Pune center had lower attrition than other cities. This was a huge advantage.
  • [Tarun] 23% of BMC is in Pune. Largest in the world. This gives huge advantages – having many different teams in one location. This is easier to achieve do than in other cities.
  • [Omkar] Pune has an advantage over Bangalore that it still has space to grow. In Bangalore, it is very difficult to find space.
  • [Tarun] Pune definitely has a better perception of quality of life compared to Bangalore. It’s still a small city compared to Bangalore – you can get anywhere in 30 minutes. And the culture and art is great.
  • [Akila] Pune and Germany have had a great relationship, because of the auto industry. Pune has the largest concentration of German companies in India. This is a great opportunity for Pune’s software industry – it needs to leverage this and grow the software market in Europe.
  • [Kiran] The great thing about the Pune Community is that all the different groups (Software Exporters Association of Pune (SEAP), PuneTech, TiE, Pune Open Coffee Club, Head Start, CSI Pune) all talk to each other and co-operate.
  • [Akila] Pune’s demographics are interesting – lower than average age, and higher than average per capita income. It is easier to find early adopters in Pune, and easier to do viral (i.e., cheap) marketing in Pune. For example, it is not a surprise that it is the gaming capital of the country.

Fab.com (co-founded & developed in Pune) raises $40 million

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Fab.com, an online ‘deals’ website specifically targeting ‘design’ items, and co-founded by True Sparrow Systems, has just closed a $40 million round of funding led by Andreessen Horowitz.

Fab.com started off as Fabulis, a social network for the gay community, but pivoted to a daily design deals site.

This is the second Pune-startup by Jason Goldberg, co-founder and CEO of Fab.com. Earlier, he had started social|median, again with True Sparrow Systems of Pune, and this had a successful exit to Xing in less than an year.

In general, Jason Goldberg seems to have perfected the art of co-founding a startup with a development team in fully in Pune. This is not outsourcing in the regular sense of the word; he works with Pune based True Sparrow to build a dedicated team for his startup, he works very closely with the team, involving them in the conceptualization, architecture and design of the product, and spends one week out of every 6 in Pune. For more details on how he does this, check out this PuneTech post from his social median days: How social|median is Developed out of Pune

In any case, the full article about Fab.com’s funding is here

IPMA Event Report: Market Research Using Social Media

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(This is a live blog of the presentation on Market Research using Social Media, by Pinkesh Shah, for the Indian Product Managers Association (IPMA) Pune event. Since it is a live blog, it might have errors, and won’t be as well organized as an article ought to be. Please keep that in mind while reading.)

Background – Why is Market Research Important

Product Management is really about Value management. There are five parts to it:

  • Understanding Value: Understand what the customer wants / care about
  • Creating Value: Build the Product
  • Capturing Value: Making sure that your product is appropriately priced. It is not necessary that you charge for the product immediately, or at all. You might make money somewhere else.
  • Communicating Value: Position your value proposition appropriately
  • Delivering Value: Making sure your product / value reaches the right person. Having the correct Channels.
Pinkesh Shah talking at IPMA Pune

For your next product or product feature, you will have lots of idea. But knowing what will really be the right thing to focus on is difficult. For a successful product or feature, the following pipeline is important:

  • Market Analysis: Choosing what to build
  • Strategic Analysis: Building the product profitably
  • Building the Product: In India we are very good at this step
  • Go to Market: Marketing it Right
  • Sales Enablement: Selling Effectively

The rest of this talk will focus on mostly on Market Analysis.

What does a PM do? It’s more than just requirement analysis:

  • Champions the customer’s context within the organization
  • Define the roadmap for a product, and deliver products that customers will actually buy
  • Master orchestrator of the productization process

Market Research – An Art and a Science

Ways to do market research:

  • Surveys: very few people do surveys. And it is easy to do. The only thing difficult is to come up with good survey questions. But otherwise this is one of the best and scalable techniques for market research.
  • Talking to your sales guys
  • Reading research reports from people like Gartner
  • Ethnography: watching your customers in their natural setting. In Big Bazaar there are always people standing in a corner of the store and observing customers. They spend 8 hours watching the patterns.
  • User research: Bring users in and make them go through use cases
  • Win Loss Interviews
  • Product Advisory Council: Announce a product, as if it is already done. Put out a Google ad about this product that does not exist. Target it for the geography and demographics that you’re interested. And then check who and how many people are clicking on it. Gives you a good idea of whether it is really working or not. Very easy and cheap way of figuring out whether your product is going to work. And you can do it sitting at home in India for any product targeting anywhere in the world

Why is social media is a great tool for market research?

  • Getting real users in a the real world is a lot of effort. Easier to get users online: LinkedIn, Facebook, Blogger, Quora, Twitter, etc.
  • Viral propagation. Truly borderless. And impossible to do without social media even if you have lots of money
  • Asychronous. You and the users don’t have to be in the same place at the same time. Makes it much easier.
  • Figure out who are the influencers

LinkedIn

Great resource. All people in professional settings are on LinkedIn. Hence, for product management, especially enterprise products, this is a great resource.

Very easy to create surveys / polls on LinkedIn and ask questions about your potential future product / features, and get responses from people all over the world. With demographic information from LinkedIn.

You can not only get quantitative results, but also qualitative results and opinions.

In addition, you get to go back and give updates to all those who participated about what happened, what features were included, etc.

Audience Question: What about competition finding out about your product ideas / features?

Answer: This is a problem with all market research. But in most cases, the idea is not the most important part of the product, so it’s OK. If indeed your idea is the secret sauce, then don’t include it in your market research, but in most cases it is no.

Uservoice

If you are a product manager, you must use Uservoice.

Similarly there is CustomerVoice, an Indian Startup similar to Uservoice, but for India.

Facebook likes are not a good substitute for Uservoice. You need really granular feedback, which a “like” does not give.

Landing Pages

A landing page can be created within 5 minutes of creating an idea. Just put up your idea, ask people to register for the beta. At this point, you don’t have a beta, but you can decide whether to create one or not based on the amount of interest you generate.

Online Ads for Validation

Think of a product. Assume that the product already exists, and create an ad for the product. Put the ad out. Target a few important cities and sectors (e.g. Bangalore, Delhi, Pune, Chennai). See how many people click on the ad, and from which city and sector. That will give you an idea of how much interest is there for your product, and which geographies and sectors your product should target.

Do not start building a product unless you have done this.

Google Ads are good for validating a concept, but not very good for getting an idea of the people who clicked on the ad. LinkedIn ads cost more, but provide much more details about the click-throughs.

Analytics

Make sure you have Google Analytics installed on all your websites. It is free and gives you lots of data on who’s coming and what they’re doing.

In addition there are paid services (often fairly inexpensive) that do even better.

For example, there is an Indian startup called Wingify that allows you to do A/B testing on your website. If you don’t know what A/B testing is, find out now.

Other interesting websites/products

  • Ask Your Target Market: http://aytm.com – ask questions to specific target groups (mostly US)
  • Sprout Social: http://sproutsocial.com – get social media conversations about various keywords
  • CDC Pivotal CRM – get twitter and other social media conversations of each customer

Parting Thought

Samuel Colt, who invented the revolver, said that his invention was one of the most important things ever. Because, he said, “God made men. I’ve enabled them to be equal.” The person without strength, money, knowledge, can still win if s/he has a revolver.

Social Media is the revolver for product management. Anyone can do it now.

Don’t let this weekend end without sending out a survey.

SEAP Book Club Meeting Report: Crucial Conversations

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(Warning: this is a live-blog of the presentation, written while the event was going on. So it might have errors, might not be as well organized as an article ought to be, and I might have misrepresented the speaker. Please keep that in mind while reading.)

The Software Exporters Association of Pune (SEAP) has a book club which meets on the first Saturday of every month where one of the members presents a summary of a pre-selected book. Since the members and the presenter are usually senior managers in Pune’s IT companies, the books chosen are usually management books.

The book Crucial Conversations was presented by Nitin Deshpande, President of Allscripts India (a medical software products company with 1000+ people in Pune)

  • This book, when you’re reading it, seems like common sense. But it is not. There are lots of anecdotes that will teach you interesting things
  • After you read this book (or a book), you cannot put all of the concepts into practice all at once. Instead, you should pick just one area where you want to improve, and then just focus on it. Don’t do too much at once.
  • A crucial conversation is a conversation you have with someone which transforms a relationship, and creates a new level of bonding. This is not a conversation for someone trying to be popular – a politician. This is not a conversation where you agree with everything the other says.
  • A crucial conversation between two people with differing opinions, and where the stakes are high, and emotions run strong. You have to tackle tough issues, and the result can have a huge impact on your quality of life.

  • Anecdote: people with life-threatening diseases were broken up into two groups, and the authors taught crucial conversations’ techniques to one of the groups in 6 sessions. At the end of one year, only 9% of this group had succumbed to the disease, while 30% of the other group had died.

  • Right motive:

    • Start a high-risk conversation with the right motive, and stay focused on that motive no matter what happens.
    • Work on ME first:
      • Often you are not clear on what you really want.
      • It is easy to fall into incorrect motivations
      • Wanting to win (no, that’s not really what you want)
      • Seeking revenge (no, that’s not what you want either)
      • Often, these desires are sub-conscious
    • Refuse to accept the suckers choice – that there are only two ugly options
      • i.e. “I can honest OR I have to lie”
      • Search for more possibilities
      • Identify what you really want, and what you don’t want. If you do this properly, and combine these two, you can think of many other possibilities
  • Safety: Have a conversation when both feel safe
    • If you feel safe, you can say anything. If you don’t feel safe, you start to go blind
    • Safety is an important requirement for a crucial conversation
      • Check the conditions/context around the conversation, not just the content
      • Learn to view silence and violence as signs that the other person is not feeling safe
        • Silence: Avoiding, withdrawing. Or even sarcasm and sugar-coating.
        • Violence: Controlling, labelling (e.g. “Fascist’), verbal attacking
      • Figure out what is your style. Do you fall into silence or violence when you’re under stress
      • Example: at a performance appraisal, an employee feels unsafe. So that’s not the right place for a crucial conversation. Give feedback earlier, as soon as possible
    • How to Make it Safe
      • Lack of safety comes from risk of loss of mutual purpose, or risk of loss of mutual respect
      • If either is at risk, then to fix it, do one of these:
        • Apologize when necessary
        • Contrast to fix misunderstanding
          • This is not the same as an apology
          • Here you explain what you did not mean, and contrast that with what you meant. This acts as first aid to restore safety
      • Make sure that there is a mutual purpose
        • Commit to seek a mutual purpose
        • Recognize the purpose behind the strategy
        • Invent a mutual purpose if no mutual purpose can be discovered
        • Brainstorm on strategies (what you’re going to do) once mutual purpose is established
    • Master your Emotions
      • Emotions don’t just happen – you create them
      • Something external happens. You react to that. Then you get an emotion. In other words: when something external happens, your brain tells you a story related to that event, and then you get an emotion.
      • To fix the emotion, fix the story.
      • Figure out what story you told yourself:
        • Notice your behavior: silence or violence
        • Don’t confuse the story with facts
        • Watch for three clever stories:
          • Victim: It’s not my fault
          • Villain: It’s all your fault
          • Helpless: There’s nothing I can do
        • e.g. Wife finds a credit card receipt for a nearby motel for husband’s card. Story she tells herself he went there with someone. Then blows up at him.
      • Complete the story
        • Turn yourself from victim to actor (“Could I be contributing to it?”)
        • Turn others from villains to humans (“Why would a normal person do this?”
        • Turn yourself from helpless into able (“What can I do now?”)
  • Listen
    • Listen sincerely to others’ facts+stories
      • Be curious, even if the other person is furious. Be patient
    • When someone is not talking, use AMPP
      • Ask to get things rolling (What’s going on?)
      • Mirror to confirm feelings (You say your OK, but you seem angry)
      • Paraphrase what you’ve understood
      • Prime the pump – start guessing when all else fails
    • Remember your ABC: agree when you agree, build if incomplete, compare when you differ
  • Action
    • Dialog is not decision making
    • Figure out how decisions will be taken: Command, Consult, Vote, Consensus
    • Common mistakes:
      • In case of “command”: don’t pass orders like candy. Explain why.
      • Don’t just pretend to consult. Really do it. Announce what you’re doing. Report the final decision
      • Know when a vote is needed.
    • Action: figure out who, what, when and follow-up
    • Document your work

Audience Discussion

  • Question: What if one person feels that the conversation is crucial, but the other does not? Example: I feel a conversation is crucial, but boss does not. Should we treat all conversations as crucial?
    • Audience Reactions: 1. You can’t treat every conversation as crucial, otherwise you’ll get tired. 2. A boss just has to get used to the fact that every conversation with a subordinate is crucial. 3. If the other person’s emotions are not running high (i.e. s/he does not see it as crucial), that’s actually a good thing, since things will not blow up.
  • Question: This seems like too much to learn and digest. How would you pick what are the first things to take away from here. Related: When I read books like this, I remember only 10%. How do you pick up more?
    • Audience Reactions: 1. When you read something like this, keep track of what you already know, what you’re already good at, and what are the areas where you need to improve, and pick only those to work on. 2. Don’t just read the book. Sign up to present it to someone – that way you’ll learn much more.

(The SEAP Book Club meets on the first Saturday of every month at Sungard, Aundh. If you’re interested in joining, contact Saheli Daswani saheli.daswani@softexpune.org)

Pune’s InnovizeTech receives Rs. 4.5cr funding from Seed Enterprises

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Pune based startup, InnovizeTech software, which makes productivity measurement software, has just announced that it has closed a Series-A investment of Rs. 4.5 crores from Seed Enterprise. Seed Enterprise is a newly established fund focusing on software products in emerging markets. It has been started by Mitesh Bohra, Avinash Sethi, and Siddharth Sethi (previously co-founders of InfoBeans). Innovize had previously received $350k in angel funding from Indian Angel Network.

Innovize Tech has built a software product, called Sapience, that helps companies measure the exact amount of time spent by employees in various work related activities. When Sapience is installed on employee PCs, it automatically figures out what work was done, by whom, for how long, and for what purpose. It produces reports that highlight gaps and deviations from pre-determined goals. The basic idea is to provide managers with data that can be used to drive efficiencies, detect underutilization, and compare with industry metrics. Sapience protects privacy of individual employees by only providing aggregate data and trends for teams > 10 employees in most cases.

Here’s their pitch from the press release:

Sapience’s key USP is that it delivers automated visibility into Enterprise Effort. It is cloud based, though an on-premise option is available for large enterprises. Their client portfolio is expanding rapidly, and currently includes large and medium IT Services firms like Zensar, product ISVs (IDeaS, Bio-Analytical Technologies), KPOs (SG Analytics), and Engineering Services companies such as EnVenture and Excelize.

Innovize has been founded by Shirish Deodhar, Madhukar Bhatia, Swati Deodhar, Hemant Joshi – Each has 25+ years of technology and leadership experience in US and India. They are Serial Entrepreneurs with 2 previous successes (Veritas Software India, and In-Reality (sold to Symphony)) in outsourced product development. Shirish, Madhukar, and Hemant were first together in Veritas Software

Innovize is also one of the companies to get multiple honours in the PuneConnect 2011 event recently held in Pune, (which PuneTech helped organize).

Read the full press release about this funding