The Hindu Business Line : Number crunching to save space

MEETING the CEO of a software company is fraught with the risk of having to hear him list out the wonders his company conjures up for customers. This meeting, however, was different.

We met Shiv Kumar, CEO of Cybernet Software Systems, to get to know how using technology has helped him save on time, manpower and cost. CSS earlier used to have some 30 servers to cater to the requirements of its 3,000-odd employees. Now it has just one, from IBM.

So how did it chance upon the change? Did the company's roots help? What skills do its programmers require to manage the system? Kumar answered these and more in our conversation.

Have you always worked on the IBM platform?

From the time we opened shop, we remained a pure-play technology company, which means we did not do Mainframes, AS400 and the like. We purely remained on WebSphere, Java, Microsoft...

When you remain a pure-play technology company, it's a lot more different than being a large maintenance shop, where jobs are largely predictable. You don't need to enrich your technical skills every day.

For example, if I am on a project doing mainframe maintenance, I typically pick up 50-75 lines of code every day, modify the code, review another person's code, and the like. Moreover, since the machine is connected to the mainframe, you are not allowed to do anything else on the machine. You work in a very controlled environment.

We were different. Our customers ask us to write an application layer on top of their existing technology. We don't have people with 8-9 years of experience writing code. India's market itself has a lot of people who are youngsters, who have to learn on the job.

This poses phenomenal challenges. The choices are between proprietary technology and open source.

Being a small company, we went in for the latter, inexpensive route.Both Thomas, the other founder, and I have had a lot of exposure to Lotus Notes and we were passionately attached to Notes.

Notes' specialty was its openness. It ran on Novell, Windows desktop and Mac Desktop. About 98 per cent of the code was common code, not just Windows code. We liked this.

With our size and the background we had in Notes, we wanted to stretch it to a level where we could do even real-time transactions but on a smaller scale. Notes has also been scaling continuously. When we opted for it, it was running only on OS2 and Windows. Subsequently they introduced Notes on AS400 and OS 390.

The greatness of the software is that Notes on OS390 runs 50,000 mail boxes on a single machine. A prospective customer from Europe once asked us to send a pricing proposal. The price calculation is a mathematical formula - it takes into consideration what server, what client software, what report output he would want, and so on. We have a calculator on the Web site, where prospects will only fill in the details.

When the form is submitted on the Web site, we get an alert into our Notes database.

Our European office gets an instant real-time alert about the prospect and this happens within a minute. Notes completes quite a bit of the process - Name, what the prospect is looking for, the price. The Indian office also simultaneously reviews the proposal. Our employees, across locations, interact through our Web site and a proposal goes out within 12-18 hours. The workflow here is really smooth.

Importantly, it took us only six hours to build this code. Applications on Notes can be collaborative in nature and of high business value.

Any other technology would have taken twice the time. None of the other technologies allows you to take the information offline. Notes provides the framework for access control, security, replication and design. Therefore, it is very easy to write rules for any application.

By how much did your technology resource requirement reduce?

We now `share a processor' compared to five or 10 years ago. You have a virtual machine or one processor that runs multiple operating systems. The software that runs the virtual machine decides this.

IBM earlier had a large AS400 platform. Today, with 4 or 8 processors, AS400 can do the job of maybe 15 Intel machines.

That was why we consolidated. Currently, we have about 40 servers. At one point we came down from 30 servers to one. But without sensible technology, we would have had about 75 servers today. We now add more processors to a box.

If the number of users suddenly goes up, the processor utilisation goes up. Even when the machine is running, I can add memory, hard disk or even a processor without having to shut down the machine.

From mainframes and to client-servers and now consolidation, we have seen a cycle. Will the trend reverse?

I think it is a cycle. This has brought the price down. From Rs 1 crore for an AS 400 box, you get it now for about Rs 25 lakh. Patterns emerge when technology changes. The pattern emerging right now is `Virtualisation'.

But doesn't the risk of complete failure rise with less number of boxes?

More the machines, more the points of failure. Though, all your applications can fail (because they are in a single box). You have to find a trade-off that works best for you.

With multiple boxes, keeping track of which application is running on which server will be an issue. For instance, if you want to upgrade to Windows XP service pack I the guy comes in, puts in a patch and leaves. You will find that the application is not working due to fine-tuning required in some other server.

Consolidation is essential once you hit a certain employee size - ours was the 1000-people mark. Once you consolidate, you will actually require fewer people to run.For a 100-people organisation, it may not work.

Did you consider outsourcing this?

We are a pure-play technology company and this could be a source of business for us. For example, we spend a mere $600 a year for an antivirus solution, much less than what one would typically spend. Our ability to configure the box, finetune it and update the virus engine, results in substantial savings.

The gate to our system today is a one-inch box for e-mail for all the 3,000 employees - without even a back-up - and this box has never gone down in the last year.

bharatk@thehindu.co.in

Pictures by Bijoy Ghosh

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