An infrastructure that will more than halve the cost of enterprise systems—this is the big dream being cherished and nurtured by the young and passionate technologists at DeusCo Technologies, among the first start-ups set up in the KReSIT business incubator at IIT-Bombay. With a beta version of their product ready for launch by end-January 2003 they now seem to be close to seeing their dreams attaining fruition.

The current range of enterprise systems require the user to change his methodologies and adapt himself to the way the system works. But what Deus has in store is expected to revolutionise the way humans perceive technology. Says co-founder Ramashish Bhutada, “Our vision was to provide enterprises with a system that will enable them to fine-tune it to suit their own requirements. Our product will provide a layer between existing platforms and applications and will enable users to make real-time changes in their system through proper point and click methods of browsing.”

According to Bhutada, there are umpteen examples of companies that want to adopt a particular process but are unable to do so due to the rigidity of their existing systems. Says he, “Most organisations are limited only by their infrastructure. They know exactly what their requirements are and also an idea about what requires to be done. All it calls for is a change in the infrastructure software and this change will bring about a big change in the enterprise process.

Future enterprise systems, as envisioned by the DeusCo team of nine entrepreneurs, will be built on platforms capable of combining transaction processing, business process automation, business intelligence (data mining, etc), collaboration and knowledge management, in a cohesive manner, for all the individual functional systems. There are three aspects that an enterprise system should take into consideration, namely workflow, collaboration and business intelligence. But at this point of time none of the available systems offer the benefits of all three. DeusCo’s product, according to Bhutada, will try and bridge this divide. Says he, “Our systems will improve ease of operations tremendously and will not only be adaptive to the context but will also be media- and device-independent and transparent.

But developing and marketing such a solution comes with its own challenges. It was only after surveying more than 60 companies that Deus was able to get down to the nitty-gritties of the problems enterprises faced. Technical difficulties cropped up when an attempt was made to simultaneously deal with large amounts of semi-structured or unstructured data. But the more than two years the company has spent in researching this area has paid off. The major problem area was collaboration or ad-hoc (commutative and associative) collaboration, to be more specific. Other problems, which have now been rectified, include integration across multiple devices and media, interface personalisation, complex cause and effect relationships and serving security concerns.

Another challenge was to achieve this with optimal development time and effort, high availability, minimal cost of evolution and minimal total cost of ownership (TCO). DeusCo developed a platform that enables this by leveraging its research in systems, algorithms, formal models, divergent mathematics and innovation in design paradigms.

But the biggest challenge according to Bhutada was getting funding for the project. The company like most other technology product companies in India was trapped in a Catch 22 situation, wherein the venture capitalists refused to fund them till they had a product to show, whereas Deus needed the money to develop the product. But despite such imposing hurdles the technologists at DuesCo have through sheer grit and determination managed to tap three customers with whom they are in advanced stages of discussion. Bhutada thanks the cohesive IIT alumni network and the brand name for their success despite the many discouragements they faced along the way. As per KReSIT rules 3 percent equity has been given to IIT-Bombay for providing the infrastructure, all the resources available at IIT, the IIT brand name, funding to start off with, etc, for a period of three years.

Currently, the company is building a counselling team for which they are tapping senior managers, entrepreneurs and academicians who will advise them on every step of the way on the path to take. According to Bhutada, they have already designed a business and technology plan as part of which they will be releasing a new product every two quarters. DeusCo is also looking at alliances with bigger companies like Sun, Microsoft, etc, who can incorporate DeusCo’s solution with their solutions. Other than this DeusCo is looking at venture funding to help them in their marketing initiatives.