ITBHUGlobal.org: The Chronicle: Council of Representatives is formed

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We are pleased to inform that Council of Representatives (CoR) is formed. We have received the overwhelming response for our first ever Council. It has 129 members from alumni and 16 from students. Thus nominations for student members from all the 16 departments have been received. The alumni representatives were selected branch/year wise (e.g. CSE 2003). The list of Council members is posted online on our website:

http://www.itbhuglobal.org/elections/archives/2008/10/nominations_received.php

The list can also be viewed in the attached files shown separately for alumni and students:

 List of members of CoR Council 2008-alumni.pdf

ITBHUGlobal.org: The Chronicle: Tristate Chapter of IT-BHU Alumni Meet on December 06-A Report

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The meeting of IT-BHU alumni in tristate area (New Jersey, New York and Connecticut) and surrounding area was held on December 06, 2008 at Moghul Restaurant, Edison, New Jersey.

The attendance was not as high as expected because the meeting was arranged at short-notice and the weather was colder.  We enjoyed the political discussion by Ravi Gupta (Chemical 1995) during lunch buffet. Rajat Chaturvedi (Mechanical 2001) came from New York.

It is planned to make Tristate chapter (formerly NJ chapter) bigger by starting various online groups. We need more participation in the way of discussion, instead of only meeting for lunch/dinner. For the time being, there will be two meetings/ year, with next one planned around April/May.

As a first step, following online groups for LinkedIn, Goggle and Yahoo have been formed. Our chapter will be officially known as Tristate IT-BHU chapter, to include people from tristate area and also from Pennsylvania, Maryland, and other nearby places.

Interested alumni please send your contact details to the undersigned for including your name in next meet.

Yogesh K Upadhyaya (Chemical 1977)

Yogesh@optonline.net

Manu Goyal (Mechanical 1993)

Manu_goyal@yahoo.com

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(From left to right: Yogesh Upadhyaya, Anil Singh, Anand Maharana, Manu Goyal, Ravi Gupta and Chilukuri Sastry)

ITBHUGlobal.org: The Chronicle: Yogendra K. Shah (Electrical 1977) as head of Travel and Transportation Vertical of Hexaware Technologies

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Yogendra K. Shah is our Electrical 1977 alumnus. He did his M. Tech. in Computer Science from IIT Bombay in 1979 and joined Tata Consultancy Services, Bombay. While working at TCS, he was involved at senior management level and posted at Middle East, Europe and USA sites. He is among the three founding partners of Hexaware Technologies. He lives in Toronto, Canada.

He can be reached at: yshah@hexaware.com.

 (Yogendra K. Shah)

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Company website: http://www.hexaware.com/

Profile of Yogendra Shah, http://www.hexaware.com/management.htm#s

 Hexaware is a specialized IT and BPO service provider, ranked as the fastest growing mid-sized company in India. It has leadership positions in PeopleSoft, HRIT, Airlines, and BFSI. It specializes in Business Intelligence and Analytics, Legacy Modernization and Independent Testing, and has over 5000 staff in 11 countries serving 145 clients globally.

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http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/hexaware-announces-new-organisation-structure/18/01/51640/on

Hexaware announces new organisation structure

BS Reporter / Mumbai December 22, 2008, 16:45 IST

IT and BPO services provider Hexaware Technologies, announced a new organisation structure with focus on three major verticals--BFSI, travel and transport, and emerging verticals (manufacturing and healthcare).

“The planned structure will facilitate aggressive account mining, enable us to define and penetrate target accounts better and provide greater value to our customers. We believe it will also foster a more collaborative approach within Hexaware, spurring our accelerated growth in the future,” said P R Chandrasekar, CEO and vice chairman, Hexaware.

Business reorganisations and consolidation was one of the initiatives taken up by Chandrasekar, after taking over as the CEO of the company in June this year.

The emerging verticals unit will focus on seeding the manufacturing and healthcare domains and will also include existing non BFSI and non travel and transportation under one roof for better management.

Other than the reorganisation, the company also appointed two industry veterans. The BFSI vertical will be headed by Deepak Rao, who joins Hexaware from Siemens Information Systems. And Anirban Chakraborty will head the emerging markets vertical, who has joins the company from Tata Consultancy Services. Moreover, Yogendra Shah who was overseeing the APAC geography for Hexaware will now head the travel and transportation vertical.

The delivery organisation has also been divided into three definite horizontals-- business technology optimization (BTO), ERP and BI, and delivery centres.

The new global BTO organization will be formed by combining focus frame and Hexaware’s testing practice and will be chartered with the task of creating a outfit with a complete testing suite comprising of automated and manual testing tools.

The geography and sales force of Hexaware is also restructured to reflect the vertical orientation as well the strengthening of the horizontals. The sales force will continue to be headed by the respective geography heads.

Rajiv Pant continues to head the North America geography, Sunil Surya continues to head the UK and Europe geography and Milind Kalurkar will now head the APAC geography.

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ITBHUGlobal.org: The Chronicle: Neeraj Kapoor (Electrical 1992) founder of One-Associates

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Company website: www.One-Associates.com

                One-Associates

              102, Hem Opal,

              Mumbai Pune Highway,

              Wakadewadi, Pune-411003 India.

                                            Tel: +91 (20) 25821373; Tel (US): (510) 402-4279

                                            Sales inquiry: sales@one-associates.com

Introduction

The company, One-Associates was started in 2006 with the objective to provide enterprise and business data to users on their Smart phones and mobile phones (BlackBerry & Windows Mobile) while they are on the move. Secondly, the aim was to provide integration of customer address data with Maps, Navigation and GPS information to improve and enhance the productivity of the field force, and at the same time increase revenue for corporate.

The company has received the TATA NEM Hottest Startup Award and 2008 Mobile Village Award. The company has office in Pune and employs about 15 employees.

About the partners (Update 1 dated Jan 09-Neeraj's photo updated)

              (Neeraj Kapoor)                                           (Himanshu Singh)                                   

Neeraj Kapoor (Director – Mobile Solutions)

Neeraj has 15+ years of IT experience with Infosys. Neeraj has lead large teams of 70+ people and programs worth more than 15 Million USD in the areas of CRM Product Management & BI for clients like Apple, DHL and Telstra. He has worked extensively in Australia, India & US. Neeraj brings to One-Associates a deep understanding of building and running large organizations. Neeraj handles the functions of Strategy, Sales & Marketing, finance & HR.

Neeraj did his B. Tech. (Electrical Engineering) from IT-BHU in 1992 and Global Management Program (GMP) from IIM Calcutta in 2007.

Neeraj can be reached at: capoorneeraj@yahoo.com

Himanshu Singh (Director & Principal Architect)

Himanshu has 10 years of IT experience with Infosys in the areas of Data Warehousing (DW) and Business Intelligence for clients like DHL and Gateway. Himanshu is a technologist. He provides technical direction at One Associates and is responsible for Mobile product management

Himanshu has a B. Tech. from IIT-Kanpur in 1998 and Executive MBA from IIM Calcutta in 2006.

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Questions and Answers:

Q-1: When did you start the company, how did you get the idea for this business and who are the partners?

Our company (www.one-associates.com) was started in the year 2006 and while we found that a lot of Mobile companies were offering VAS (Value Added Services) for consumers related to ring tones, games, bulk sms and text messaging. There were few companies who offered mobile services to SME (Small and Medium Enterprises). With the launch of 3G services and high speed data access in markets globally, the need for mobile products which can provide corporate data “Anywhere Anytime” is slowly becoming a norm. Few people are using laptops now to view, search and update information while they are outside the office. Therefore, we entered into a mobile segment which services the corporate and industry that have field sales and service teams. We have partnered with companies which provided LBS (full form?) and GPS data and those partnerships have been forged recently.

Q-2: What types of mobile based services provided by you? What technology do you use?

We provide mobile products. Our mobile CRM product provides following functionality - Users can view, search and update Accounts, Leads, Calls, Meetings, Contacts, Opportunities, Tasks and Notes and data synchronization with backend. Additionally, we’ve generic adapters allowing us to integrate our product with any backend/custom CRM solution. Integrate the software with text readers to read emails and text messages. Our solutions are integrated with Maps and kocation based services to provide rich user experience on mobile phones.

An SOA based architecture and the solution is built on BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES), MDS, C# for Windows Mobile, J2ME for Java phones and Objective C for iPhone with GPS and text to voice reader integration. We offer our Mobile CRM product (One mSales) as a stand alone solution as well as SaaS (Software as a Service) Model. This solution is available with Sugar CRM and Saleforce.com. We have build middleware adapters to suitably integrate with any CRM with ease. Users can initially sign up for a monthly subscription for 6 months or they can buy on a per user license fee. Zoom in and Zoom out of Maps and Click to Call.

Q-3: How can your mobile based services and solutions be useful to clients? Who are your typical customers?

Our product is useful to customers as the user doesn’t need to haul up his laptop each time s/he has to search, view and update information from the enterprise system. Our Solution offers following features to clients

Ø    Easy Wireless Deployment & Application Upgrade

Ø    High Secure transmission of Data

Ø    Complete Control over data & application on device.

Ø    Address Information integrated with Maps

Ø    Click to call client from all screens

Ø    Click to email from all screens

Ø    Click to SMS client from all screens

Ø    Easy Upload of Images

Ø    Text to Voice reader for emails, contacts and Addresses

Ø    Location Based Tracking of Field Sales personnel

These aspects of the solution help the user in reducing paper work, reducing the travel, improving the productivity of the field team, improved customer satisfaction, increase in revenue and tracking of field sales team at Anytime Anywhere. Our solutions are highly secure whereby the data on the device can be controlled centrally and transmitted securely via GPRS making it extremely useful for corporate which have to follow high security standards.

Our customers belong to retail, distribution, manufacturing and business services. Our Typical customers are companies who have 10-100 employees who are in the field.  These employees need inventory, customer address, order, invoice details at the point of sales (POS) and using our solution they can easily access this information.

Q-4: Any other aspect you would like to talk about.

At present we are looking for advisors and mentors from the Telecom and Mobile industry as well as people who are successful entrepreneurs. We are looking for partnership with Telecom companies globally to place our product on their application store. ______________________________________________________

The message from Neeraj Kapoor, founder

The objective to write to the readers of this newsletter is to bring to notice of people who are working at Small and Large corporate to deploy Mobile CRM solutions to improve sales and productivity of their teams and company. They should take advantage of the new mobile technology to differentiate your company in the market place. Corporate in Retail, Manufacturing, Business Service and Distribution businesses having large teams of field personnel will hugely benefit from such a solution. Mobile solution can have a huge benefit from a cost reduction as well as revenue generation perspective.

Mobile revolution is the happening at a very rapid pace and a lot of users in the Asian markets will have their first experience of web and corporate information directly on mobiles. With the rollout of 3G networks globally, next 5 yrs are going to see even rapid pace of mobile technology development and deployment. Even in this financial downturn it is companies like Apple, BlackBerry (RIM) who are continuing to grow and hire. Most of the telecommunications companies are seeing drop in growth on Land (Fixed) line revenue but seeing double digit growth in Wireless space with launch of WIMAX and wifi networks.

I would like to tell the students to start thinking about the venture they wish to launch while at college itself. This is the best time for you to write your business plans and evolve your ideas with the professors. You have the luxury to fail and learn from your mistakes therefore, use these 4 yrs to learn and start a new venture with friends and generate employment rather be an employee.

Thanks,

Neeraj Kapoor

One-Associates

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Additional links:

1) Review of One-Associates in MobileVillage.com

http://www.mobilevillage.com/yp/one-associates.htm

2) Red Hat Software Catalog Vendor Profile

https://www.redhat.com/apps/isv_catalog/VendorProfile.html?cat=isv&vendor_id=6187

3) TATA NEN Hottest Startups Awards

http://www.hotteststartups.in/viewandvote.do?method=fetch&businessFn=viewandvote&startupId=629

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ITBHUGlobal.org: The Chronicle: Dr. Manu Vora (Chemical 1968) interviewed on Chicago Public Radio for Blind Foundation for India

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It is a pleasure to share that Dr. Manu Vora (Chemical 1968), President and Founding Director of Blind Foundation for India (BFI), an USA based Not-for-Profit organization was interviewed by Mr. Jerome McDonnell from the Chicago Public Radio/NPR on Thursday (11 December, 2008) on Worldview program.

 The interview Podcast audio is available at:

http://www.chicagopublicradio.org/content.aspx?audioID=30812

and click download.

The interview is 15 minutes long, and can be listened on computer with Windows Media Player, Wave and other file formats.

It talks about the current situation of blind people in India, and the charity work done by the Blind Foundation for India.

For more information about BFI, please visit: www.blindfoundation.org.

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About Dr. Manu Vora (Chemical 1968)

Dr. Manu Vora is Chairman and President of Business Excellence, Inc. a global quality management consulting service firm. He has over 30 years of leadership experience guiding Fortune 500 companies with Malcolm Baldrige assessment in the areas of leadership development, customer satisfaction, employee engagement and continuous process improvement.  As an Adjunct Professor, he taught “Quality Management” and “Supply Chain Management” at Stuart School of Business at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. He taught “Quality Assurance Project Management” at the School of Continuing Studies at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. He is a Past Vice President of American Society for Quality (ASQ), ASQ Fellow, and Certified Quality Engineer. Manu has B.S. (BHU 1968), M.S. & Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering and MBA with Marketing Management. He is a sought after speaker on business excellence and quality management topics with over 210 presentations at local, regional, national and international levels. He has published a chapter on “Managing Human Capital” in the book “Six Sigma for Transactions and Service” by McGraw-Hill in 2005. Dr. Vora served as a Chief Judge at Illinois Team Excellence Award Program from 1993-1999. He is serving as a Judge on the Board of Examiners of the International Asia Pacific Quality Award since 2004.

Dr. Vora has been recognized with numerous awards from ASQ including ASQ Grant Medal, ASQ Lancaster Medal, Testimonial Awards, and ASQ Chicago Section’s Joe Lisy & Founder’s Award.  Manu received “2008 2^nd Asian American Community Leadership Award” from the Office of the Clerk of the Circuit Court of Cook County in Chicago, “2000 Paul Harris Fellow Medal” from the Rotary Foundation of Rotary International, and “1990 Distinguished Service Award” from Save The Children Federation. He is listed in “Who’sWho in the World”, “Who’sWho in America”, “Who’sWho in the Midwest”, “Who’sWho in Science and Engineering”, “Who’sWho in Finance and Business”, “ Who’s Who in Business Higher Education”, and “American Men and Women of Science”.  He received the prestigious J. N. Tata Endowment Scholarship in India for his graduate work in the United States. As a founding Director and President of Blind Foundation for India, Manu has raised over $3.5 million to help over a million visually impaired people in India.

(Dr. Manu Vora)

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Manu K. Vora, Ph.D., MBA, ASQ CQE, ASQ Fellow

President and Founding Director, Blind Foundation for India

ASQ Grant Medalist (2001), Lancaster Medalist (2005)

Adjunct Professor, Stuart School of Business, IIT Chicago

Chairman and President, Business Excellence, Inc.

P. O. Box 5585, Naperville, IL 60567-5585, USA

Tel:  (630) 548-5531; Fax: (630) 548-5532; Mobile: (630) 660-3869

E-mail: manuvora@b-einc.com/

Website: http://www.b-einc.com/

Website: http://www.iit.edu/profiles/alumni/manu_vora.html

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About Chicago Public Radio

Website: http://www.chicagopublicradio.org/default.aspx

 Chicago Public Radio is a legendary public service broadcast system. It is a non-commercial Public Radio system broadcasting from Chicago, Illinois. Financed primarily by listener contributions, Chicago Public Radio is affiliated with both National Public Radio and Public Radio International; they also broadcast content from American Public Media. There are very few such public oriented radio broadcasts left in US, as most broadcasts are commercial radio systems. It shows how a public oriented non-profit radio system can change the lives of community it serves.

Chicago Public Radio broadcasts its primary service on three FM radio stations, with call signs WBEZ (91.5 FM) in Chicago, WBEQ in Morris, Illinois (90.7 FM), and W217BM (91.3 FM) in Elgin, Illinois. Listeners can also receive the Chicago Public Radio broadcast online with streaming audio, MP3 download or by podcast. As of 2006, the station draws an estimated 600,000 listeners each week.

Chicago Public Radio began as an extension of the Chicago Board of Education and began broadcasting as WBEZ in 1943. For most of its early years, the station only broadcast instructional programs, operating during the school year on weekdays while Chicago Public Schools were in session. In 1972, WBEZ joined National Public Radio and began general programming outside of school hours, not completely dropping instructional programs until the early 1980s. Initially, most programming outside of the instructional programs and NPR programs was jazz music. The Board of Education sold the station to the current license holders, the not-for-profit WBEZ Alliance, Inc., in 1990.

Programming on Chicago Public Radio includes the usual world music, quiz shows, and international and local news on a regular basis.

Company’s mission statement, as posted on its website is as follows:

“Chicago Public Radio is a community-supported, public service broadcasting institution. We offer programs that speak with many voices to community needs and are a reflection of the distinctive and diverse Chicago area. We help listeners learn about issues and ideas that affect the community, the nation, and the world.

We produce, acquire, and distribute engaging, thoughtful, and entertaining programs of depth, breadth, diversity, and substance that speak powerfully.

We are principally a broadcaster. We also serve our local and national community with supplemental distribution initiatives. We expand our outreach to the community and enhance our production effort through partnerships and educational programs with local and national institutions.”

Additional Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Public_Radio