The Hindu Business Line : FirstRain to expand R&D teams here

ANY company, in this extremely competitive global market, is faced with the challenge of keeping abreast of the latest information to take strategic business decisions.

Surf the Web with popular search engines; you may still be saddled with loads of details, knowing not how to find the relevant information in the maze.

Well, help is on hand. FirstRain was carved out in the backdrop of the dotcom bubble era and has since moved on to create technology platform that solves this problem. Not just that, it has managed funding of about $32 million, with its latest round of $10 million. The Chief Executive of FirstRain, Ms Penny Herscher, on a visit to India, told Business Line how the company has made life easier for 40 plus companies that include JP Morgan, Citibank, Novartis, Cisco and Microsoft with its customised technology platform.

But there is a catch. These solutions are currently offered only to companies and that too in the areas of financial services, pharmaceuticals and hi-tech areas. Media could possibly be another vertical.

Ms Penny has embarked on an India trip to expand its research and development teams located in New Delhi and Mumbai. Predominantly, a US-centric privately held corporation, First Rain, has its R&D team and global support team in India and the entire marketing and front-end is handled from the US.

She said, "Imagine the need to make critical business decisions, based on information on stock markets, share prices, business performance, trends and small critical tid-bits that can fundamentally affect business performance — surfing the Net without finding any relevant information. Through this customised software, a company can get latest updates from information that is gathered from just all over."

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