In a little over two years, Bangalore Labs has established itself as a thought leader in the security space with a broad span of service and consulting offerings. Prashant L Rao finds a company that has acquired a strong client list in India and is aiming at replicating its success in Australia and the US

Joy nandi says security is not a point implementation, but a moving target

“Five of us got together to set up the company. There was Natarajan from Lucent, T G Ramesh and myself from Nortel, Umesh from Infosys and Sriram from FedEx,” says Joy Nandi, the chief executive officer of Bangalore Labs. “We were the first or second startup around the time that MindTree was launched. All of us were successful in our respective businesses and wanted to see how we could create an organisation in the services space. We saw a phenomenal disconnect between people who understood networking and those who understood business processes. There was a great divide between SIs on one hand and the Big 5 consulting firms on the other. So we launched India’s first Managed Services Provider (MSP) with an NOC (Network Operations Centre) called IMARC.”

Bangalore Labs began life in November 1999 as a Managed Services company with its primary focus being on remote network management. Network performance, security and management of a network setup were part of a second level of services that were launched mid-2000.

Initially the company’s focus was on international markets with the US being the biggest potential market and an offshore delivery model. Bangalore Labs invested a lot in the US only to retract due to the slowdown. It shifted focus to India. “Even today we are considered a thought leader in the security space with the widest breadth of consulting, security and technology architecture services,” says Nandi. “Security is not a point implementation, it is a moving target. Take signature updates, there’s a 24 to 48 hour gap between updates. We have advisory services that get data from forty sites, collate it and map it to an organisation’s IT structure.”

MILLIND DIKSHIT says that whatever the company does fits into the three parameters of availability, performance and security

The other new focus was on the APAC market that continued to grow even when the US came under a cloud. ICICI Ventures had funded the first round but when it came to the second round of financing, the company was looking for a strategic investor who could provide both funds and a platform to package and deliver services. In came Planet One, a Singapore-based technology holding company, that took a majority stake. Planet One bought out the first investor. Bangalore Labs divested shares and created a holding company called Bangalore Labs Asia. The Planet One deal gives Bangalore Labs access to 17 cities in 11 countries.

The company has focused on IT infrastructure management of networks, systems and applications. “Many customers believe that they need people on site for day to day management. This has lead to the newest addition to our service portfolio IT outsourcing,” says Millind V Dikshit, who is head of technology solutions and security at Bangalore Labs.

Two main groups
The company’s portfolio is grouped under two heads remote services and consulting. Under remote services come remote network management and remote managed security. Under consulting falls networking solutions, information security, enterprise management solutions and IT outsourcing. Remote network management consists of ensuring availability, performance and security. Bangalore Labs has its own NOC (Network Operations Centre) called IMARC which monitors these three parameters, 24x7, across three shifts. “Whatever we do is going to fit into these three parameters of availability, performance and security,” says Dikshit. Remote vulnerability assessment consists of looking for holes in a company’s network and security setup and suggesting fixes. There’s an advisory service where vulnerabilities in existing elements are found and customers are apprised of what needs to be done.

Priya krishnan says that Bangalore Labs has productised services with clear deliverables and costing

In ethical hacking, Bangalore Labs signs an agreement with a client that lets it hack into the customer’s network during a particular period. The company provides the customer with the proof of its hack in the form of compromised data. If the client desires, it is given advice on how to prevent such intrusions.

A service that is on the anvil is forensics, wherein an incident is investigated and Bangalore Labs undertakes the job of finding out who compromised the system, from where, and the extent of damage. “We don’t look into the legal side. But on the technical side we see what traceback can be done and what the losses are,” says Dikshit.

Consulting
The consulting division is involved in providing networking solutions wherein Bangalore Labs’ own tools and products are used to measure and improve performance of a client’s network. IP Accountant is one such product that is not sold separately but is used for projects.

Security consulting and implementation consists of drawing up policies, processes, selecting technology and then implementing it all. Here ISO17799 certification comes into play. From the beginning the company has focused on vendor plurality and it has tie ups with ISS, Symantec, RSA and Novell for various components of a security solution. Enterprise management is done under either HP’s Openview framework or IBM’s Tivoli. Bangalore Labs implements ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) a UK standard ensuring that Openview or Tivoli ties into ITIL. Dikshit relates the case of Bangalore Labs’ implementation of ITIL at GE’s Jack Welch Technology Centre.

Open culture
Right from genesis, Bangalore Labs has striven for transparency and a non-hierarchical structure in the organisation, with defined accountability and responsibility. “We are an open organisation with no restrictions regarding access to people. The aim is to learn from peers, seniors and people on our teams,” says Nandi. “There was always undue pressure on work in our earlier jobs and so we aimed at having fun while doing work to get greater productivity. We have impromptu KM sessions. On the last Friday of each month we have a Coke and samosa session where different locations dial into Bangalore and the management team sits in.”

Today, Bangalore Labs is looking at the Australian, APAC and US markets. It has started with Australia where being a part of the Planet One group gives it a leg up. Here Bangalore Labs is offering remote management, enterprise management on site and security on site services. It has people in the market looking after presales and is setting up a satellite remote management centre in Australia on a smaller scale. “We expect some big orders in the July-August timeframe. We are looking at managed services including managed telephony. For instance, a lot of people are not aware of toll fraud where someone calls into a PBX and takes control of an outside line and makes international calls,” says Nandi.

The plan is to take a leadership position in the IT support services game. To do this the company intends to leverage on the cost-advantage of doing offshore work from India. At the same time it intends to have people on call in international markets to provide on-site support.

India focus
Almost all of Bangalore Labs’ revenues accrue from India with a small percentage coming from the US and Australia. Consulting, security and enterprise management have given good revenue in India. The break up has been roughly 50 percent of consulting revenues coming from security, 30 percent from enterprise management and 20 percent from networking solutions.

In India the company has two models to address the domestic market. It targets the top 250 clients in Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore and Chennai using its direct sales force. The second method is to go through the channel to get geographical reach and target the next 250 to 500 clients. Partners include Tier I pan-Indian ones and Tier II regional companies. “We are the first to offer services through the channel,” says Priya Krishnan, head of business development. “We productised services with clear deliverables and costing.”

In India, the company has been successful in roping in blue chip clients such as Reliance, HLL, Citibank, L&T, Hughes Tele.com, Hathaway, Vysya Bank, GE Capital, GE Jack Welch Technology Centre, Pepsi and the Oberoi Group. Its roadmap is to sign up the top 250 companies in India. A couple of years back, Bangalore Labs had taken the direct route in the US. However, it switched to reselling through a channel of SIs. The company does have a few direct clients including GM and plans to have 10 to 20 named accounts in the next one year. It has a channel manager in the US who looks after 10 regions with two local partners in each region. The company has a few alliances in the US with mid-tier SIs ($50 million companies).

In Australia, Planet One’s group company 3D Networks is Nortel’s enterprise business SI with 1,500 customers. “Our aim is to sell services to this installed base,” says Krishnan. Today 95 percent of the company’s revenues come from the Indian market. It is aiming for a 60:40 split down the road.

Going forward, Bangalore Labs will continue to introduce new services, grow organically as the market matures it expects business to grow in India and target Australia and the US. After Q3 it will look at satellite markets in Singapore, Malaysia and the Middle East. It has grown from handling million-dollar orders toward end-2001, to a point now where it is poised to cross ten-million-dollar orders internationally. Bangalore Labs has 60 employees. But if everything goes to plan, Nandi hopes to have a hundred people on board by year-end.