Excerpt:

Rice said the company has been very successful in manufacturing engineering products at Chakan. Therefore, it could consider setting up manufacturing lines for other businesses of GE. In India, the company is looking for more manufacturing opportunities in healthcare, engineering and affordable power generation equipment sector.

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More details about this round of funding are here. More details about the first round of funding are here. More details about Karamveer Singh are here.

Excerpts:

Product teams based out of Pune no longer play second fiddle to their global teams, supporting them with coding, testing and quality assurance. They have moved up the maturity curve managing the product pipeline, customer interface and channel partnerships.

and

“R&D centres set up in the last 3-5 years have brought products at higher maturity as they see India as a destination for core product development. Bangalore had a headstart in engineering support while Pune has leveraged on its talent pool to recalibrate its strengths towards product capabilities early on,” said Preeti Anand, engagement manager in Zinnov . Currently, Pune has over 110 MNC R&D centres employing 24,000 people.

(Note, though, that Bangalore is still far ahead in absolute numbers – it has 350 MNC R&D centers compared to Pune’s 110.)

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Here is an overview of what BMC does, and the challenges it faces:

BMC sells software that manages fleets of computer servers and mainframes, configuring new machines and applying updates to older ones. One of BMC’s business units makes software for managing server networks and the other is focused on mainframe products.

and:

BMC, a Houston-based provider of software that keeps corporate computer networks running smoothly, gets about 40 percent of its sales from the lucrative business of managing powerful mainframe computers from International Business Machines Corp. Yet it has had a harder time keeping up with rivals in the market for server software, which has been moving to companies’ data centers as customers rely more on programs delivered over the Web.

Competitors who have transitioned to the cloud are causing problems for BMC:

The emergence of software delivered as a service via the so-called cloud has helped newer competitors such as ServiceNow Inc. and Splunk Inc. to grab market share. BMC is also contending with traditional rivals CA, Hewlett-Packard Co. and IBM. About a quarter of new ServiceNow customers are replacing BMC products, ServiceNow Chief Executive Officer Frank Slootman said in a recent interview.

So how will this buyout help?

As a private company, BMC plans to become more aggressive in managing cloud-computing applications and mobile devices, BMC CEO Bob Beauchamp said in an interview.

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Knife is a command-line tool that provides an interface between a local Chef repository and the Chef Server. It is used by administrators to interact with their cloud infrastructure from the command line.

Chirag Jog, CTO of Pune-based Clogeny software recently gave a talk at the Chef Conference about the use of knife plugins to manage VMWare’s VCloud Director. Here is the abstract of the talk:

Knife cloud plugins extend Knife’s behaviour to easily manage servers(nodes) in the public or private cloud using Chef. vCloud Director(vCD) is the flagship cloud provisioning product from VMWare which power several public clouds like Bluelock, AT&T, Dell etc as well as private clouds. The aim of this session is to help developers understand knife cloud plugin framework, cover the basics of VMWare vCloud Director and how they can extend the existing knife vcloud plugin or write new plugins to manage their own vCD-based cloud.

And the here is the talk itself:

If you’re unable to see the video above, click here

Excerpts:

“So far, we have funded entrepreneurs in Bangalore and the National Capital Region (NCR), that is, around Delhi. We see many companies here (Pune) developing enterprise software products for the globe. Our prime interest is to see if we can have the next Oracle or SAP from a city like Pune because we want a made-in-India product for the globe,” said Aggarwal.

One of the reasons why Pune is a good destination for startups is that several global companies have a development center here, which means that finding experienced technical people is not a problem:

“We find Pune to be a hot centre because of its educational base which has led it to be the captive research centre for several global product companies, so the technical talent is available here. We would like to supplement it with sales talent so that the company can scale up and achieve what we want: a product developed in India for the globe,” Aggarwal said.

Small companies going after the enterprise market need VC funding because of the long sales cycles:

“There are some 300-400 start-up companies in Pune. They need money and if VCs are coming here, that is good. Software product companies have long sales cycles for which they need funding,” said Anand Deshpande, chairman and managing director, Persistent Systems Ltd, an outsourced product developer.

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Excerpts:

The Dixits put in a seed capital of Rs 3 lakh and launched Sheep-Stop in September 2009. The money also helped them rent a small warehouse in Pune. Interestingly, all of their six employees are women. “It was a conscious choice since I wanted to see if it was possible to run a company with only women,” says Dixit.

and:

The business model is simple. Every week, freelance designers are asked to submit designs, which are put up on the website and the company’s Facebook page. The audience votes for the favourite designs, and at the end of the week, one design is declared the winner. This is sent to manufacturers in various parts of India, and the finished tees are sent back to the company.

and also:

In the previous fiscal year, the company reported a turnover of Rs 60 lakh. As part of its expansion drive, the firm has recently added designer shot glasses, badges and magnets to its repertoire.

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The survey covered 13,050 school students (7th, 8th, 9th and 10th standards) spread across Pune, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Lucknow, Patiala, Bhatinda and Nellore.

The survey was conducted from October to December, 2012.

Here are some interesting findings:

• 42% feel it is not a crime to use pirated software in India
• 67% children reported having started using Facebook before the age of 10.
• 26% kids reported having more than 500 Facebook friends
• 36% kids did not know their Facebook friends in real life.
• 82% reported having received vulgar, offensive or abusive emails or Facebook messages

See the full document:

Survey on Cyber Attitude of School Children in India (2012) by Rohas Nagpal

Click here if you’re unable to see the document above.

Excerpts:

Poorvi Agarwal’s first day at work was a lot of fun. The sales executive at travel website MakeMyTrip’s Kolkata office spent most of her time quizzing on the computer with several others who had joined the company the same day. Were Agarwal and her colleagues goofing off at work? No, they were taking part in a unique induction programme that uses online games as an ice-breaker for new employees.

The games are the brainchild of Pune-based MindTickle, a year-and-a-half-old start-up that provides web-based “gamified” training and orientation products for companies.

[Read full article][bloglink]

Excerpts:

FoodLink is a platform for produce buying and selling and enables all participants in the fresh food supply chain to track and trace items from the moment they are harvested to the point at which a consumer makes a purchase. The FoodLink network is also an “open platform” capable of tying all relevant supply chain and procurement data directly to purchase orders.

and:

“Opening this new development centre is a reflection of the importance of the Indian market and our belief that the best solutions always start with the best people,” said [Eric Peters, CEO, FoodLink].

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