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The
‘Made in India’ product tag has not been something that India’s
software industry has been able to boast about to date. However,
a few companies are set to change that, one of them being
Hyderabad-based Pramati Technologies, one of the first companies
in Asia to launch Java-based products. With biggies such as
BaaN, SSI, Aditi, Majoris and NetKraft on its client list,
the company’s product focus seems to be paying off, says
Prashant L Rao
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Vijay
Pullur says the road wasn’t easy, but the company
has pulled through |
Very
rarely will one find an Indian company forgoing the virtues
of body shopping to concentrate on product development, that
too the creation of cutting edge products that win kudos across
the globe. Hyderabad-based Pramati is one such exception that
has constantly been first in Asia and often the world in releasing
Java based products. “We had a tie up with Sun before
it established an India office,” boasts Vijay Prasanna
Pullur, chief technology officer, Pramati. The company’s
latest product release, version 3 of their Application Server
is the first such product in the world to support the entire
J2EE 1.3 specification the latest enterprise Java standard
from Sun. This path-breaking product was released at Java
One Japan.
The road wasn’t easy with Pramati having to endure 15,000
tests from Sun to get the coveted J2EE certification. “We
have the Application Server with the smallest footprint,”
adds Pullur.
History of firsts
Pramati has had a long history of firsts. It was the first
company in India to license J2EE and among only three companies
picked to exhibit Enterprise Java Bean (EJB) technology at
Java One in 1999. Another first was when it edged out competitors
to become the first company to release products supporting
EJB 1 and 2 in 1999 and 2001. “Our focus on research
and development and experience in the Java community process,
has helped us deliver EJB 2.0 server technology to the market
early,” says Jay Pullur, chief executive officer, Pramati
Technologies.
The company’s philosophy has been to keep its tools open.
To this end its full-featured Enterprise Application Develop-ment
product, Pramati Studio, can be used with Oracle 9i AS, Bea
Weblogic and IBM Web-sphere the dominant Application Servers
on the market. Studio runs on Linux or any UNIX platform.
Pramati’s Application Server runs on IBM AIX, HP UX,
Linux and NT.
Faster time to market
Pramati has also created a reputation of sorts by being the
first to market with products once new standards are announced.
The 120 strong R&D team is the third largest J2EE developer
team in the world. 10-15 percent of the engineering team at
Pramati is from database biggies such as Oracle and Informix.
The strategy
Jay
and Vijay Pullur had a vision of the Web as a global client-server
platform from day one. Pramati Application Server 1 was launched
in 1997 and it incorporated technology that was in many ways
the same as J2EE. That was the time when Java was more about
applets that ran on a desktop. Pramati predicted the future
with server-side Java which is where Java finally took off.
By having the business logic on the server using Java and
Web interface through JSP-like templates, Pramati got it right.
Pramati’s products, services and OEM programs let Enter-prise
Solution Vendors (ESVs) re-engineer their offerings to J2EE
or embed J2EE into their application. Today, almost any enterprise
product using J2EE needs an app server. Pramati’s AS
plugs into the ESV’s application and is bundled alongside.
You don’t get to see it as a separate product but its
there on that enterprise application CD all right.
The company’s clients include BaaN, SSI, Aditi, Majoris,
NetKraft and Amtec to name a few. It has clients spread across
the geographies of US, Europe, Middle East, Africa, Singapore
and Hong Kong. About two hundred server licenses have been
sold to date.
Pramati got second-round financing from Intel Capital and
k1 Ventures and plans to use the funds to expand its international
sales and marketing. On the feature side, the company plans
to add Web services to its application server product by March
2002. Says Avtar Saini, director of South Asia, Intel, “Applica-tion
servers form a critical component of the Internet infrastructure
and e-business architecture. Intel Capital is always interested
in companies, like Pramati, that have the ability to apply
an application seamlessly across a variety of platforms.”
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