"Standardisation of IT products are usually driven by the IT giants."
- Rathnakumar Kayyar, MD, WebSpectrum Software Pvt. Ltd.

The city-based software company WebSpectrum (WSSPL) has been managing networks in the IT arena for the last three years. The company's Managing Director Rathnakumar Kayyar, who has over sixteen years of professional software experience in Networking Management and Distributed Object Computing, spoke to bangalorebest.com about the company's activities and its foray into optical networking.

· WSSPL specializes in distributed computing. What is it and what are the other related activities in that field?

Distributed computing is an integral part of network management, which is our focus area. Network management involves processing distributed information about network and devices, and CORBA is being chosen more and more for achieving the distribution. Having expertise in CORBA ,TMN and SNMP we are now looking at other new applications on Internet and intend developing products for their requirements.

· How are your products standardised?

Broadly, I can say that our products are differentiated based on quality. Though there are some bodies governing standardization, corporate giants like Microsoft, Cisco and others play an important role in standardizing the products. It becomes logical for smaller players to follow their standards.

· Which are your major projects?

We have developed SNMP and TMN based "Element Management Systems" for many customers. For example, the work we have been doing for Symmetricom Inc has been going on for 3 years. Many versions of the product are in the market. This is an application that manages a network of devices, providing standard CMIP and SNMP interfaces to network management systems.

· Who are your clients at present?

At present, we offer our services to many IT companies like Lucent Technologies, Symmetricom Inc, Hewlett-Packard ISO, Rapid5 Inc, Infosys and other networking companies like BPL Telecom, VSNL. In future, we intend to focus on optical networking companies as they are going to be the bandwidth providers. Optical networking companies, together with optical equipment manufacturers, will be our next set of customers.

· Any plans to incorporate clients from other fields in the coming years?

We have to be ready for the requirements of both networking and telecom sectors as the world is gearing up for convergence.When networks converge, the person who communicates is not sure about the mode of media, whether it is through regular telecom network or Internet. Convergence is picking up and there is a lot of hype about Voice Over IP and other applications. These newer applications need better "Quality Of Service" guarantees and we are gearing up to provide such products..

Rathnakumar Kayyar hopes that e-governance and e-shopping are going to be large areas, wherein network management can play a vital role. He also anticipates enormous growth in optical networking management, which is going to ease the lives of a common men.

Charan C S

|