Social networking gets Net worthy through Zylog

While Chennai reels under heat and humidity, a company in the metros Nandanam area quietly churns out new technologies to enable businesses harness the power of social networking. Thats Zylog, a 13-year-old company, which was left with little choice for survival.

It was listed first in Mumbai and then on the NSE. It wanted to provide high quality solutions with technology as the enabler, according to founder-chairman and CEO Sudarshan Venkatraman. Since the company worked from both India and the US, the latter enabled it to be in touch with the latest technologies in the field.

When Zylog launched IDEA LAB (Innovative Development of Enterprise Applications Lab), a software research unit to offer value-added R&D outsourcing services at Chennai, it paid dividends. This R&D division develops prototype solutions around Enterprise 2.0 technologies for demanding business requirements, like the recently launched Enterprise 2.0 Computing Framework, which is built on the IBM Websphere platform and uses service-oriented architecture (SOA). This initiative has acquired multiple global endorsements by a broad spectrum of CE professionals who have validated the application to ensure its success rate, says Venkatraman.

SOA separates functions into distinct units (services), which can be distributed over a network and can be combined and reused to create business applications. These services communicate with each other by passing data from one service to another, or by coordinating an activity between two or more services

The Enterprise 2.0 Computing Framework offers a complete social networking platform that includes features, like blogs, Wikis, forums, tagging, bookmarking and intelligent searching. Zylogs proven expertise lies in the area of SOA, Web 2.0, and rich internet applications (RIAs) development methodologies. This means greater business flexibility as it enables businesses to preserve core legacy investments while leveraging cutting-edge tools and development languages to streamline programming, processing, enhancements and integration of new applications.

Now the company is developing an integrated platform with CE Accelerator that interconnects all the key constituents of the consumer electronics industry, like manufacturers, retailers, suppliers, logistics organizations, recyclers, call centers, service providers and trade associations. Simultaneously, the company is also developing a service accelerator, which is a platform that connects all the independent service providers using a single set of standards. This shall make any software connect seamlessly to these players, thereby making combined operations more efficient.

Starting out from Chennai, the company now has offices in the US, Singapore and UK, outside India. While the revenues are Rs 606 crore for the year, the profits have gone up by over half, to around Rs 83 crore, as compared to last year. The major shareholders are UTI Ventures, Agronaut Ventures and EIF Coinvest, who collectively bought around 15% of the company. The US market, which is the biggest consumer of electronic goods worldwide, is expected to rise 6.1% and earn around $171 billion this year, despite the fears of rising energy cost and economic slowdown.

We are focusing on acquiring smaller companies offering niche products that complement our solutions and services, says Venkatraman, who is also looking at growing in new regions, like the Middle East and Asia Pacific, through acquisitions. The company is also investing in newer verticals as it enters pharma and creative services. Over the next couple of years, Zylog plans to augment its employee strength by 3,000 as it expands to newer markets with enhanced product range.

Corporates join the Hi5 club

AFTER THE enormous success of social networking in the consumer segment, corporates are now fast incorporating similar open knowledge-sharing tools to enhance collaboration among employees.

IT services and solutions provider Zylog Systems Ltd (ZSL) has announced the launch of its Enterprise 2.0 computing framework, which will help companies set up their internal social networking tools as well as integrate existing communication platforms.

The social networking framework called SocNet is the first-ofits kind, built on IBM Websphere sMash, which was launched in April. Zylog is IBM’s partner to develop the framework and will together go-to-market, said Shiv Kumar, executive vice president of ZSL Inc.

Though most companies already have internal portals, the usage is minimal because of less or no user participation. The social networking platform helps ideas and information to seamlessly flow within the organisation, he said.

The main advantage of the framework is that it decreases implementation time from a few months to about four to six weeks, he said.

Policy decisions on what to allow or restrict influence the time to implement social networking tools. The medium might be used to broadcast objectionable content or emanate slander.

However, the framework provides general guidelines on what to allow or restrict and hence implementation time is reduced, he added.

Open knowledge sharing within organisations is meant to enhance collaboration and hence innovation. Hence, integration with existing legacy communication systems becomes important. The framework also addresses the concern by enabling service-oriented architecture implementation, said Shiv Kumar.

Social networking platforms are built on web 2.0 technologies, which allow user-generated con tent in the internet. Forrester Research estimates enterprise spending on web 2.0 technologies to surge over the next five years, reaching $764 million (about Rs 3,200 crore) in 2008 and growing at 43 per cent annually to reach $4.6 billion (about Rs 19,500 crore) in 2013.