Another Indian first, this time from Vaman

While Indian companies have been contributing to the patents of MNC majors, and have even succeeded in developing some products, few of them had the maturity to develop core enterprise applications. VENKATESH GANESH takes a look at Vaman Technologies, a home-grown RDBMS vendor, which is relying on its IP-led model and value-added features to gain market share in this highly contested space

THOUGH Indian companies have been riding the services boom, the future lies in an IP-led model. Mumbai-based Vaman Technologies certainly belongs to the new breed of Indian companies which believe that developing products that are core to an organisation is the future of Indian IT. With the launch of India’s first home-grown relational database management system (RDBMS) that is both platform and vendor independent, Vaman has entered uncharted waters. Built on an RDBMS core, Vaman DataServer has achieved performance and scalability that measure up to industry standards. More significantly, the company has filed for 15 patents and has 28 more in the pipeline. Before delving further into India’s answer to Oracle or SQL server, let’s look back at how this idea came about.

Searching for a database

Founder Mahesh Pawani was into bullion trading, but IT was close to his heart. In the nineties when India’s software services industry took off exponentially, every company that knew a few lines of COBOL or C jumped into software development. It was tempting for Vaman too, but the company’s founder had made up his mind.

Explains Pawani, “We could have gotten onto the software services bandwagon, undertaken Y2K projects, and made money, but we decided not to pursue that route.” With the domestic market for software products growing, and lucrative markets such as the Middle East and parts of Asia opening up, there was a promising market for Indian product vendors.

The idea of a database came about when a leading bank based in the UAE approached the Vaman group to develop a database based on open standards. As the market for RDBMS was huge, Vaman decided to innovate and create a product in a space where no other Indian vendor had entered. Gartner estimates the RDBMS software market to be close to $7.1 billion. Looking at this potential, Vaman spent 14 months on the development of the DataServer.

With the Oracles, Microsofts and IBMs of the world wooing Indian enterprises (and SMEs too), would Vaman’s RDBMS find many takers? Avers Subramanya Kusnur, the company’s executive director, “We understand that we are up against mighty big competitors, but we have a strong belief in our offering. We spent a lot of time in R&D in the core areas of data and database management to measure our product against the others, and we can now proudly claim that ours is the first Indian RDBMS.”

Kusnur’s belief stems from the fact that the use of Foxbase applications in India is still widespread. Since most organisations wishing to move to a web-enabled environment are confronted with issues relating to high investment and quick implementation, they typically stay away from purchasing a RDBMS. Vaman hopes to score over traditional vendors by bundling a full-fledged e-mail and web server at no extra cost along with the core database. Additional features include automatic crash recovery tools, graphical analysis of database resources, and a high-performance text search engine.

It’s open

This is possible due to the open structure of the Vaman Universal Server Architecture Platform. For transforming data and migrating it from any source to any destination, the company has developed a set of tools called Vaman Katalyst. The company says that Katalyst can transform flat files and raw data to RDBMS (and the reverse), binary data files to RDBMS (and the reverse) and a host of other functions. Apart from this, Katalyst is suited for application development, cross platform application porting, legacy application porting, data warehousing and building multimedia databases.

Says Anil Pandya, managing director, Robocom India, a DataServer implementer, “It is the use and protection of earlier investments that differentiate Vaman’s products and services. Further, any application written on any backend can be easily ported to DataServer without any coding or change in design.” Adds Kusnur, “With this offering, we are not asking companies to change their systems. We can get their data converted into any format.” This reduces the dependency on a particular vendor.

Initial successes

The worldwide launch of Vaman DataServer was announced this month. Till date, banks, commodity exchanges and the government sector have expressed interest. The company has around five system integrators, and there are plans to increase this number as the product stabilises in the marketplace. Vaman has also listed itself in the Institute for Development and Research in Banking Technologies—a clear pointer to one of its target segments.

Banks from India, UAE, Singapore and China have shown interest. The company has installed the beta version of the DataServer in the Crawford Market police station, which is the headquarters of the Mumbai police and houses its entire crime database.

Road yet untravelled

The Indian market mirrors the worldwide scenario, the dominant players being Oracle, Microsoft and IBM. According to an IDC report, these three have a collective marketshare of approximately 75 percent. It further estimates that the information and data management software segment is set to grow at a CAGR of 17 percent till 2006. Considering that (probably) only 25 percent of the market is up for grabs, Vaman has its task cut out.

On the functionality front, other RDBMS vendors offer most functions offered by Vaman, but it has a slight edge on the price front, which translates into a better return on investment for SMEs. It’s also easy to install. It can be run on a Pentium 100 with about 32 MB RAM and less than 35 MB HDD capacity. For SMEs running on shoe-string budgets, this feature could prove to be extremely useful. Additionally, Kusnur feels that the security aspects are better taken care of since the web and mail server are housed in a single server.

An aspect that needs to be looked into is the ‘education programme,’ whereby online communities and developers can disseminate technical information on its business application. Says Kusnur, “We are addressing this aspect, and in the near future we will be opening the Vaman APIs to developers so that the product gains momentum.” As a part of this initiative, Vaman has launched a project called Vaman Varsity. This initiative has been extended to institutes such as IIT Powai, SNDT, IIM and D Y Patil, where the company has begun an awareness drive. Further challenges lie in gaining acceptance from Indian enterprises and SMEs.

The company has targeted revenues in the region of $100 million for the next year. It hopes to increase its headcount—150 at present—to 200 by the end of the current year. Though the vision is in place, it will be interesting to see how enterprises or SMEs react to a new player in the traditionally conservative field of database management.

venkatesh@expresscomputeronline.com