The Hindu Business Line : Make your mark

While big software service companies usually grab much of the attention, there is the odd, smaller Indian company that has broken ground in its own way. Like this one.

WHILE software service companies of the likes and scale of Infosys Technologies or Tata Consultancy Services grab much of the attention given to the information technology industry, there is the odd, smaller Indian company that has broken ground in its own way.

Not only that, the nature of their little known work — of the type of something more akin to product creation rather than servicing — is generally considered more difficult from the perspective of Indian industry. One such company, Microworld, has made quite a name for itself in the information security area. And another, a yet shy company called Opus Software Solutions, has acquired its fifth customer on Wall Street in the US for its suite of products for brokerage firms. It recently entered into a $1.8-million deal with F-Ten Inc for its `TradeNow' suite of trading platform and applications.

According to Ramesh Mengawade, CEO of Opus, his is the only Indian software company that has a trading product used by firms on Wall Street. TradeNow powers its customers' systems to provide order routing and direct access to NYSE, Nasdaq and ECNs. It also allows straight through transaction processing capabilities. This is a combination of applications never offered by any other firm anywhere, says Mengawade. And, according to him, the product has acquired new customers through the reputation of its performance and by word-of-mouth recommendation. TradeNow has customers such as Wall Street brokerage firms JMS Securities (second oldest Wall Street stock broking firm), Wedbush Morgan and Advantage Trading who had switched to TradeNow. TradeNow also powers the top five brokerage firms on the Taiwan Stock Exchange — Polaris Securities, Jihsun, Masterlink, Entrust Securities and Capital Securities. These firms accounts for 22 per cent of the stock trading on that exchange.

Domestically, TradeNow has one customer — HDFC Securities — which has been using the suite for three years now. Mengawade says the company's area of concentration is not the domestic market. The company's entry into the US itself is a major breakthrough, seldom achieved by Indian companies in the product arena, he says. Besides, overseas margins are higher. Opus now plans entry into the European market.

Opus has another suite of products that sells under the name of `Electra'. This is used for applications such as ATM Networks, credit card management and payment gateways for banks across the world. Opus Software has over 60 implementations of Electra across the world. This suite has been sold in the US, the Philippines, Kenya, Tanzania and other countries in Africa. Mengawade had earlier worked on a Nasdaq-related project with Tandem Corporation. Opus is basically a private limited firm that belongs to him and to four or five other professionals, most of whom are from Indian Institutes of Technology and some of whom have also worked with large corporates such as Tata Consultancy and Wipro.

According to Mengawade, there is a huge opportunity for the company overseas, especially with respect to its TradeNow suite. "Many of the older Wall Street brokerages are using technologies that are 15 to 17 years old. Those softwares are not flexible enough. With TradeNow, there is not only more flexibility lent to operations but also greater speed that allows for cost savings." And, he says, TradeNow has already proved its worth because Opus competes with international vendors in international customer acquisition. In addition, according to him, there is no other company that offers the range of operations that TradeNow does.

Opus now has 300 professionals who work out of two development centres in India. The company does business of about $5 million annually. However it has targets up its sleeve that Mengawade is reluctant to talk about. Opus has two fully-equipped engineering centres in Pune and Chennai with Tandem, IBM, SUN and HP servers, ATMs, Kiosks, HSMs, POS devices and software engineering tools. Its business model includes offshore development and consulting services, solution sales and support, and technology incubation and development.

Opus is now an ISO 9001: 2000 certified company, heading towards SEI CMM Level 4 certification. A separate product division focuses on equities trading and ATM switching solutions.

Picture by Bijoy Ghosh

kripram@thehindu.co.in

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