“We have entered into a global economy ushered by the knowledge era. It is imagination, invention, and the organization of new technologies that are the key strategic ingredients for an enterprise in this era. Thus, knowledge and skills now stand alone as the only source of sustainable competitive advantage. The Focus on Asset for the industry has shifted from tangible to intangible, competitive assets like skill, know-how, structure.” Founded in 1988 in Bangalore, Canarys was the brainchild of motivated technocrats. During the initial years, the company, which is today an established and financially well-managed company, focussed on the IT products and services space, offers solutions in Test & Measurement Automation based on IEEE-488 bus, which included embedded systems, Instrument Drivers and Device drivers. To know more about the company, VARIndia recently met Srihari Boregowda, Director & CTO, Scorpus, and Pushparaj Shetty, Vice-President – Sales and Marketing, Scorpus, who bare it all.
Further in mid-90s, the expertise in designing and developing software solutions ushered Canarys into IT application development, maintenance and support. Over the years, Canarys has consolidated its processes and technical depth acquired by executing projects for a spectrum of domestic and MNC clientele. This has enabled Canarys optimize its business model and delivery.
Canarys has set up processes and expertise in the areas of analyzing software systems, fixing bugs, enhancements, designing and building new modules. In the early nineties of the past millennium, the Indian Government embraced started to embrace free market economy that broke the shackles. As a result, the country adopted the change at a crucial stage of globalization and knowledge-based economy.
“We are into the knowledge era. So, industrial worker is the knowledge worker. Capital is the intellectual capital. How much a person can add value to the economy. Focus is to create more knowledge. Tools used are software. We virtually collaborate across the world,” says Srihari Boregowda, Director & CTO, Scorpus.
“We have entered into a global economy ushered by the knowledge era. It is imagination, invention, and the organization of new technologies are the key strategic ingredients for an enterprise in this era. Thus, knowledge and skills now stand alone as the only source of sustainable competitive advantage. The Focus on Asset for the industry has shifted from tangible to intangible, competitive assets like skill, knowhow, structure,” says Srihari.
“Managing the asset is important. Software becomes the core asset for any company. The trend is already there,” adds Srihari.
As the opportunity is growing, the growth of SMBs has now become proverbial. Everything is being converted and embedded into software and process. But the challenge is that of managing complexity and rate of change as business is changing every time. So, Scorpus allows you to manage the assets. Treat your software assets in such a way through which you can create wealth.
“We are partner of Microsoft. We have the code database. This is the first product from India into the segment of asset management,” says Srihari.
One of Canarys preferred Architecture definition is Canarys Product Line Architecture (PLA), PLA helps organizations to define Product line framework. The framework can be used to define the product line and enable the reuse of architectural framework across the products in the lineup.
Canarys has recently launched Scorpus, a software asset creation and management product. This product helps the IT organizations to remain competitive by achieving economies of scope through software reuse. With Scorpus, Canarys forays into the metadata repository market which is estimated at a size of $150 million by 2009.
With this product, the less experienced workers can reuse assets easily while more experienced ones focus on strategic initiatives. Thus, it helps realize and implement reuse practice in organizations.
“The growing investments in IT and increasing pressure on software development companies to get more productive, we foresee monolithic software application development practices taking a backseat. The future is definitely moving towards the ‘Software Factory’ concept and Scorpus lays the foundation for it as an enabler for software reuse,” said Srihari.
Scorpus, a metadata repository product solution manages complex IT infrastructure by creating interrelated assets as models for enterprise systems at conceptual, logical and physical levels. Once it has assets, the change to the IT system is governed at increasing speeds and reduced cost by reusing them at composite levels.
“Today, IT organizations in the enterprises are challenged with increased complexity and shorter rate of change. It is no more about just people or technology, but about managing the complexity of enterprise systems to cater to the fast-changing business needs,” says Srihari.
“Tight integration among systems makes enterprise brittle. The turnaround time extends to four to six months. As resources move (attrition/promotion), maintenance of systems gets expensive due to knowledge recovery costs (around 50% of effort is spent in knowledge recovery). The requirement, therefore, is to have an organizational ‘mind tool’ that powers IT system development, captures tacit knowledge and makes it available across the enterprise as knowledge assets. Scorpus,is geared up take IT organizations to the Knowledge Era,” says Pushpraj.
Armed with Enterprise Software Asset Management (ESAM), Scorpus helps enterprises define, create and map software assets with their interrelationship, context and levels of detail to support through usage, variations, and enhancement lifecycle, reducing the turnaround time of projects to a few days.
With regard to the company’s roadmap to market the product, Pushpraj says, “We will open offices in India and US around July. We will have dedicated sales force for both these countries, but the delivery and support system would remain in India.”
Regarding the channel model, Srihari says, “Channel partners will be in the form of commission based lead generators for Scorpus direct sales team. Scorpus will also look at tie-ups with the mid-market focussed systems integrators to carry Scorpus platform for their BPM, SOA, and EA solutions.
Scorpus has a tie-up with a company in Bangalore to address the Indian market.
“We plan to increase it to at least one each across Mumbai, Delhi and Chennai,” says Srihari.
