Channelworld India

Venkat M Sundaram Stresses That Stromasys' Solutions Are Vertical Independent

By Radhika Nallayam Sunday, March 15, 2009 12:00:00 AM IST

CW: What is the importance of having cross-platform capabilities in a virtualized environment and how significant are your offerings?  
SUNDARAM: Typically, software continues to have a longer lifecycle than the hardware that it runs on. Cross-platform capabilities stop users from duplicating their efforts in redeveloping or porting an existing, steadily running application that is running at a lower pace. It enables clients to run the same application without any modification at a faster pace, thanks to virtualization and the availability of a faster hardware platform. Thus, cross-platform capabilities help in huge savings in terms of time, efforts, and funds for the new platforms. It also ensures continuity of business-critical applications with a better speed.  This assumes more importance if a client has developed mission-critical applications or interfaces to other systems over a period of last few decades. It would be a mammoth task if the same stable environment/application have to be redeveloped.
Stromasys’ offerings are virtualized hardware abstraction layers, presently available for VAX/Alpha Systems of erstwhile Digital Equipment Corporation (now a HP company). They break the monotonous, expensive and time-consuming way of migrating applications from one platform to another.

CW: Could you tell us about your current customer base in India and worldwide?
SUNDARAM: We have few clients in India, namely HP Global, Indian Airforce, Bokaro Steel, and ICI Paints. We have more than 2500 clients worldwide. Our MNC clients comprise Nokia, Airbus, Oracle, and HP. Besides, process control system majors like ABB/Siemens, refineries, and railways and power companies will also open up a new line of business for us in India. Now with our local presence, their offshore centers of operations in India will graduate to adopt our solutions in the months to come. We are also planning to extend our client coverage in few countries in the Middle East. Ideally, any enterprise that has a stable application running on VAX/Alpha systems but faces issues with speed and high maintenance cost will need our solution.

CW: How big is this market globally and where do you position yourself?
SUNDARAM:About 50 percent of the software engineers work to maintain old applications. It is a challenge to keep spending on the development of new applications. Every proven application at the client’s place running at lower speed on VAX/Alpha platform require our solution. Over 200,000 VAX and 300,000 Alpha systems are in operation worldwide as estimated by HP, but we believe there should be more. We are the only commercial grade solution available for these platforms (SIMH being an open-source alternative).

CW: What’s the market potential you foresee in India in the coming days? What verticals will you target?
SUNDARAM: We believe that this is the right time to start our operations in India. Almost all the departments in the space agencies, defence sectors, and public sectors are running mission-critical applications. Big industry houses are running process control applications. All these organizations are part of our market. Our solution is vertical independent. But process control is a niche application. Clients are now open to adopting non-conventional but proven solutions, as it brings huge saving in their budgets, besides improving productivity in a short duration.

CW: What will be your go-to-market strategy for India?
SUNDARAM:  We are planning to take different routes to reach our clients. We have so far appointed five VARs in the country. We will have few more partners appointed in the next one quarter or so. We will also have direct project marketing by working with systems integration players like CMC (now a part of TCS), Electronics Corporation of India, and BHEL, to name a few.
We intend to work with HP India on their project-specific requirements.

CW: How do you intend to ensure partner profitability?
SUNDARAM: With the number of old VAX / Alpha systems available to be virtualized in India promising enough, our partners will have adequate projects in their pipeline for the next two years.
We will have virtualization solutions for other platforms rolled out soon from our R&D center in Geneva, ensuring business continuity for our partners. With our offerings, partners can avail business continuity with their existing clients or open up new client relationships as our solutions provide unique offering to their clients. We will continue to make investments in imparting technical trainings to our partners.

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