India Report: Work

Aug 15 2007

Now we get to the real reason I flew nearly the circumference of the earth in order to get to India. As cool as the Culture was, that wasn’t why we went.

The real reason that Dave Gray (Doba’s CTO) and I went to India was so that we could spend 26 hours meeting with 5 different companies over 4 days in 4 different cities. We met with Aditi Technologies in Bangalore, ValueLabs and AppLabs in Hyderabad, Persistent Systems in Pune, and Impetus in Noida.

Doba is kicking off plans to open an offshore development center. This is a decision that we’ve come to after careful consideration of lots of different factors. The main driving force behind these plans is a need to have access to additional capacity and flexibility with our development efforts. We have a development and technology team based in UT that is amazing. And that team will continue to grow over time. We also want the benefits that an offshore development center offers us. There are definitely challenges with this strategy, and that’s why Dave and I talked with and met with everyone we could to talk about the pros/cons of this decision. We talked to other technology companies, we talked to Venture Capitalists; basically everyone and anyone we had contacts with so that we could educate ourselves on what to do and what not to do with an initiative like this. Dave spent the good part of 3 weeks getting referrals for companies that manage the development for you and checking on their references so that we could make sure our offshore partner was the best of the best. In the end, we picked 5 companies to meet with in India, and are in the mid-stages of picking our partner overseas.

India was a great experience for me. I think I finally caught the vision of globalization. There are so many opportunities with the way the world has changed in the last 15-20 years and with how it’s continuing to change at increasing rates over the next many years. I’m excited for Doba to engage in global commerce in a new way. I’m excited for our current technology/development teams to further their careers by helping Doba embark on this new road. In the end, I’m excited for me to be able to gain experience with something new, exciting, and challenging–and full of opportunity for Doba, our customers, and our employees.

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