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Spotlight
Designing and building products
Impetus Technologies believes in working with its clients
as partners in order to understand their business needs to deliver better services.
By Varun Aggarwal
 Impetus
is a product engineering service company that creates cutting-edge software
products, offers outsourced software R&D, testing, quality assurance and
support services to software and technology enabled companies. The company was
founded in 1991 as a software products start-up. Impetus Technologies is headquartered
in Silicon Valley, with a wholly-owned subsidiary named Impetus Infotech in
India. The company has sales offices in USA and offshore development centres
in three Indian cities.
Setting up the foundation
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 "We
have ventured into new and emerging domains, set up a dedicated R&D
facility for new technology areas, grown our existing facilities and also
set foot in a third location, in Hyderabad, and exponentially increased
our client base in the USA"
- Praveen Kankaria
President & CEO,
Impetus
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Praveen Kankaria founded Impetus Infotech (India) Pvt. Ltd.
in India in 1991 as a products company. After successfully establishing Impetus
in India, Praveen moved to the USA to start a US front end in 1996. He has been
the driving force behind the company’s focus on product design and development,
providing vision and direction to the company through its evolution and growth
to close to a thousand employees today.
“Impetus has been a media-shy company. We wanted to
first get our act right, take time and hone processes and practices, and build
credibility through our work”, says Praveen Kankaria, President & CEO.
In 2003, Impetus embarked upon its first major expansion in
India. The company set up its second facility in the National Capital Region,
and with this expansion it gained a lot of media and public attention. Kankaria
says, “Since then, we have been growing at over 50 percent year on year,
and have also strengthened our position as a premium outsourced product development
services provider. We have ventured into new and emerging domains, set up a
dedicated R&D facility for new technology areas, grown our existing facilities
and also set foot in a third location, in Hyderabad, and exponentially increased
our client base in the USA.”
| Conception |
1991 |
| First Big Sale - New server to Rajasthan Patrika
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1992 |
| First Outsourcing client (3M) |
1995 |
| Set up HQ in USA |
1996 |
| Partnered with Colleagues in USA to start Servigistics
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1998 |
| First office expansion |
2000 |
| Reached the 100 employee Milestone |
Dec 2001 |
| Expansion into Delhi |
Sep 2003 |
| Second big facility in Indore |
2004 |
| Set up sister companies in India |
2004 |
| Shifting to bigger facility in Noida |
Feb 2005 |
| Set up office in Hyderabad |
October 2005 |
| First 100-person client team |
An Enterprise level Telecom client in November 2005 |
| Expansion in Executive Management |
July 2006 |
| First CSR activity; Tie up with Parivartan Sanstha
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September 2006 |
| Crossed the 800 employee mark |
October 2006 |
| Reached a major milestone in turnover |
January 2007 |
| Tie up with IIM Indore |
February 2007 |
| Got the State's Best Exporter Award |
June 2007 |
Line of work
The company is working with clients in the diverse domains of mobile & wireless,
digital media, performance marketing, internet advertising, network security,
telecom, etc.
Impetus offers services for all kinds of software product design and development
requirements. “Our clients rely on us to build, maintain, and support leading-edge
enterprise-class software products for them. We focus on new and emerging technology
paradigms and have done significant work on new technologies including Ruby
on Rails, J2EE, .NET 3.0, OpenLaszlo, Flex, REST, Brew, J2ME, Symbian, FlashLite,
VoIP and IPTV,” adds Kankaria. The company’s innovative approach,
coupled with its core engineering strength, aims at exceeding the expectations
of its customers through the innovative use of technology, and adding significant
value to its clients’ product design and development initiatives.
The company has three offshore development centres that include three facilities
in Indore, two in Noida and one in Hyderabad and takes up almost 1,50,000 sq.
feet of work area.
- Implemented a load testing, automation
solution for one of the leading providers of Linux-based e-mail and
calendaring software. Impetus set-up an offshore team in its Indore
development centre to work on the client's application suite.
- Impetus conducts functional, regression
and performance testing on the product. The client features in the Red
Herring list of top 100 technology companies. As a part of the project,
Impetus is conducting load testing using its internally developed tool.
This includes identifying performance critical test cases and executing
them to create performance baseline results. Impetus is also working
on functional testing and regression testing. Automation testing is
also being conducted, which involves design and development of an automation
framework using Silk Test and HTTP unit test tools.
- The company is working with the industry's
first Mobile Loyalty and Community Service (MLCS) that provides mobile
carriers, game publishers, music and video publishers as well as content
based entertainment companies with solutions for maintaining customer
loyalty, reducing churn and creating new revenue streams. It offers
an event-driven integration and services platform for storing points,
currencies, tokens, coupons, etc. Carriers and mobile content providers
can use MLCS to create all kinds of account-based loyalty and community
programs. The platform makes it easy to integrate with mobile applications,
such as games, to issue, redeem or trade these points as directed.
- Impetus handles the critical task of creating
the MLCS Server providing the user registration service, customer loyalty
service & gaming service. It is also involved in creating the J2ME,
BREW, JavaScript and ActiveX connectors.
- For a client that provides software for
performance based online advertising network, Impetus is redoing their
product on a new technology platform. They provide advertisers with
the targeted volume needed to generate high-impact direct marketing
response and fast ROI. They have a product that is used for co-registration,
which is currently written in PHP/ MySQL. Impetus has the responsibility
of rewriting it in J2EE.
- Impetus has partnered with a pioneer in
the field of Blog Rating Engines that uses a Web 2.0 application. The
client provides an online "user-created reference resource"
space as a single site that offers a global knowledge exchange. They
combine user-contributed content with a peer-review ranking system and
hence, making it easy for Web site users to gain the required insights
swiftly from the given content. Impetus is responsible for providing
development, database optimisation and quality assurance services to
this client. The company is using new and emerging technologies like
Ruby On Rails, Mongrel, PostgreSQL and FAST search for this assignment.
- Impetus is working with a company which
provides breakthrough technology that drives the next generation electronic
payments, transaction processing and over-the-air (OTA) management systems,
and readers. Through this technology, customers can make contactless
payments through radio frequency (RF) enabled credit cards, debit cards,
key fobs, access cards and infrared cell phones at the existing point-of-sale
(POS) system. Many technologies like J2EE (JDK1.5, J2ME), SOAP (XML),
RMI using JBoss/Weblogic Application Server and MySql/Oracle 10g Database
Server will be utilised for this project.
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From start-ups to enterprises
Impetus’ clients include software product companies ranging from enterprise
level organisations to new age start ups. The company views itself as its clients’
business partner and creates software which gives them a competitive edge. It
approaches every engagement with a long-term perspective and, as a result, has
enduring and successful relationships with its clients.
According to Kankaria, Impetus has developed many high-end products in a variety
of domains for their clients. Examples include:
- Architecture and implementation of a supply chain
parts planning product.
- Development and maintenance of connectors in a variety
of languages such as .NET, Java and C.
- A combination of event-driven mobile integration
platform and digital asset management solution for storing points, currencies,
tokens, coupons, etc.
- A state-of-the-art File library and tracker has
been implemented with hash winnowing document comparison algorithm.
- Developed a token tree and regular expression based
data extraction engine with average data processing speed of 60 GB/hour.
Among other significant projects, Impetus has worked on designing and creating
an enterprise Web reporting tool built using next generation Web-based technologies.
This reporting suite, called Intellicus, makes report designing, deployment,
and distribution simpler, faster and easier. Intellicus dashboards, ad hoc and
standard reporting tools can be embedded seamlessly into enterprise applications
by Independent Software Vendors. Intellicus provides on-demand reporting solutions
to various industry leaders in healthcare, finance, banking, insurance, ERP,
supply chain, CRM, security and interactive-gaming.
The company has also developed an automated load- testing tool that helps predict
system behaviour and performance. It exercises an entire enterprise infrastructure
by emulating thousands of users to identify and isolate problems. This tool
tests system behaviour under real-time conditions and converts this data into
simple-to- understand, yet informative and sophisticated, graphs and reports.
Armed with this information, businesses, which develop Web applications can
more quickly and efficiently resolve problems, thereby ensuring a positive end-user
experience.
Recruitment and work atmosphere
According to Kankaria, Impetus recruits top of the line IT
professionals. The software engineers usually hold BE, B Tech, MCA or equivalent
degrees. “We hire candidates with prior and relevant experience and also
hold recruitment drives in various Tier I and Tier II cities in India to choose
the best among software professionals. We also recruit directly from prestigious
educational campuses. Employees in our non-engineering functions typically hold
an MBA degree and are experts in their chosen fields.”
Impetus offers a warm and friendly work environment to its employees. “We
recognise individual contributions-both at the engineering and operational levels.
Our transparent processes and systems make sure that credit is given where it
is due. We also have a practice of rewarding super achievers, either through
out of turn promotions, or monetary incentives, star recognitions, spot rewards,
ESOPs or even the annual Outstanding Employee Award.”
Career growth at Impetus is fairly well defined, keeping in mind that engineers
need to see a change and growth at a pace that they are comfortable with, given
the dynamic pace of change and growth in the IT industry.
The hierarchy is relatively flat starting from Trainee Software Engineer to
Software Engineer to Senior Software Engineer to Lead Software Engineer to Manager
Software Engineering to Director Engineering to VP Engineering. The company
has more than 900 employees.
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