The Hindu Business Line : Focus areas and plans

CSS recently appointed C.R. Venkataraman as its Chief Technology Officer. eWorld wanted to know about his role in an organisation that focuses on technology capability, and claims the presence of several tech specialists already on its rolls. Venkataraman, an entrepreneur twice over, answers...

What opportunities do you see here, especially after having been an entrepreneur?

We need to create focus groups first in technology and then move into specific vertical domains. We are creating a momentum within the company and calling it 'Go For 100', i.e., a $100-million revenue target in the next two years.

CSS has been a father figure for its Group companies, SlashSupport, ReadyTestGo and Synaptris, but it has not done enough to create visibility for itself in the market place given its capability and focus. My immediate task is to strengthen the technology focus and build on the technical expertise that we have in technologies such as Java and .Net.

Any favourites on the technology focus areas for CSS?

Java, Open source and .Net are the technologies that we currently have expertise in, and this will be enhanced to a design and architecture level.

As CTO, do you need to de-risk by betting on several technologies so that even if a few fail, the others succeed?

There are two aspects to my role: One, to strengthen the core technology areas where CSS already has expertise. We will create a Core Technology Group (CTG) to work on emerging technologies and to make this expertise visible in the market place. Two, we will create R&D Groups that would look at the market trends and work accordingly on emerging technologies. When a new technology does come in, we should be ready with prototypes. This will help us de-risk the company and its growth prospects.

Any focus on verticals that would help in your vision?

I plan to expand three verticals in which we have expertise in and which have growth potential: interactive television; monitoring and analysis of online advertisements; market-lead management system.

On the first front, we have expertise in Set Top Box (STB) technology. We are one of the first to work on a technology called LUA, which is the name of a computer language.

OCAP (Open Cable Access Protocol) is a standard for how a Set Top Box will work with an interactive TV. In the US, TV distribution companies now realise that they have a huge library of software at the backend. The idea is to make these `libraries' available to the viewers on specific channels. One can log in through the Net or the TV, choose a movie, download it and view it at his/her convenience. Also, with OCAP, one can order online pizzas. Basically, what CSS is trying to do is to make TV semi-intelligent, which can take care of most of your daily requirements.

The Core Technology Group that we are going to create will focus purely on research on emerging technologies and advise our team on where to invest and which areas to focus on. This Group will not be part of our delivery team. One of the challenges for me is to convince them to get them out of the revenue generating team to focus on R&D.

In the online ad space, we have developed a methodology to analyse the number of hits, the quality of hits and finding out the return on investment on the ad.

Third, we have implemented a lead management system for a bank in India. The bank has made it the core software for running its operations.

Will there be a natural extension into software for consumer durables?

There is a huge opportunity for us in this space. TV companies in the US have access to billions of dollars worth of software and they are trying to tie up with the distribution channels to reach customers. They have the largest software library in the world, and the average time spent watching TV is also the highest there. Customers here are looking at investing heavily on the technology front as they see high growth.

In the entertainment space, is CSS also into animation software?

We are doing some amount of gaming software. We are more into enabling multimedia content to be viewed. With hardware (i.e, the Set Top Box) already available, our focus is to make the software available with more features. In a set top box, you typically have only a text-based interface that just provides information about the movie. Our technology helps viewers to watch a multimedia clip of the movie.

Today, control over viewing is very much with the content provider. At CSS, our focus is to get the software content from the library to the viewer.

Picture by Bijoy Ghosh

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