Expert View

November 17, 2005
GrapeCity to expand operations in Delhi, Bangalore

NEW DELHI -- GrapeCity is a Japanese software corporation with offices in Japan, China, India, Mongolia, and the US, and over 650 employees worldwide. For 25 years, it has been bringing the benefits of IT to enterprises worldwide. GrapeCity has over 21 years of software development experience.

Convergence Plus met Ashoke Ghosh, president, GrapeCity India, to discuss the various products and services offered by the company. Excerpts from the interview.

Convergence Plus: Please give us a detailed overview of GrapeCity?

Ashoke Ghosh: We bring to the establishments, the benefits of the latest technologies by providing optimised software solutions and services. Our areas of competence include custom application development, software components, technical support and quality assurance, and providing business solution expertise in areas such as customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), supply chain management (SCM), school management and financial accounting. We are a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and believe in highly personalised service with a strong emphasis on ethics and honesty.

GrapeCity India has over 140 employees and has recently relocated to its state-of-the-art office complex in NOIDA. GrapeCity India was established in 1996 as the corporation’s Development and Research Center. We provide consulting, development and implementation services in the domains such as software components (PowerTools), custom software solutions, CRM, ERP, technical support and quality assurance.

Products & Services

GrapeCity Business Solutions:   By identifying our customers’ needs, offering business solutions that fit those needs, and following through to make sure the solutions are properly implemented, we help our customers’ business flourish.

GrapeCity Technical Services: We assist our customers solve their technical challenges by offering technical services geared to each customer’s specific requirements, with a strong emphasis on quality.

GrapeCity Technical Tools: Our offices in Japan, China, and India offer an extensive collection of reusable add-on custom controls and development tools for Microsoft and Java technologies.

GrapeCity Wine Studio: Our state-of-the-art design and production studios in Japan can help you with print media, electronic media, computer graphics, and film projects.

Shinkansen Process Framework: Our collection of proven best practices for timely, efficient delivery of software solutions and services serves as the foundation for everything we do.

CP: How can your solutions help customers achieve business goals?

AG: GrapeCity offers a broad range of products and services, all aimed at applying technology to help our clients achieve their goals. At GrapeCity, we don’t believe in a “one size fits all” approach; rather, we work closely with our clients to understand their needs and then tailor our services and solutions to their specific requirements.

At GrapeCity, everything we do is focused on helping our clients achieve their goals. Our key principles—thoroughly understanding our clients’ business objectives, providing highly personalised experiences, maintaining a strong emphasis on quality, and adhering to the highest ethical standards—serve as the foundation for all the products and services we offer. In addition, we emphasise mutual respect and transparency in all our relationships—with our clients, our partners, and our employees.

We have equally high expectations of our clients. We believe that we achieve the greatest success when our clients are active members of the team. Working together, we develop an in-depth understanding of the business problem and a vision of what it will take to solve that problem. Then we make that vision a reality. All of these principles are embodied in our Shinkansen Process Framework, which provides a set of best practices to guide all our efforts. From developing an understanding of our clients’ needs, to creating a plan for meeting those needs, to maintaining open communication throughout the project, the Shinkansen Process Framework encapsulates our philosophy and values and helps ensure a successful outcome.

CP: What is Shinkansen Process Framework? How is it helpful for the customers?

AG: Across all the services that GrapeCity provides, we are guided by two principles:

First, our focus on our customers means that we provide personalised services, tailored to each customer's specific needs. Second, our zero-defects philosophy means that we follow rigorous quality-assurance procedures, so we can catch and fix any problems early on in the process. Both principles are embodied in our Shinkansen Process Framework. 

Named after Japan's Shinkansen bullet train, famous for efficiently getting people to their destinations, GrapeCity's Shinkansen Process Framework is a collection of best practices for timely, efficient delivery of software solutions and services. We start every engagement by developing an in-depth understanding of our customer's needs. Then we select the specific methodology that is best suited to meeting those needs. Once a project is under way, we stay in close touch with our customers through regular communication and weekly reports.

In addition, we deliberately limit the number of concurrent projects that we take on; so as to make sure we fully meet each customer's needs. From the president onwards, down the corporate ladder, our management is involved in every project, reviewing weekly reports to make sure that customers' needs are being met. We also use these weekly reports as part of a continuous improvement process, learning from each project to make the next project run even more smoothly.

We apply the Shinkansen Process Framework not only to the work we do for our customers, but also within our own development organisation, to create distributed development teams. By enabling us to build virtual development teams and deploying resources across a variety of locations based on skill and business need, the Shinkansen Process Framework provides us with a high degree of flexibility and helps us make the most efficient use of our resources.

Some of the software development best practices embodied in the Shinkansen Process Framework include:

• Choosing the life-cycle model that best fits the project and the customer's needs (e.g., waterfall, modified waterfall, evolutionary, agile lifecycle), rather than being locked into a particular methodology;
   
• Evolutionary prototyping, an approach that enables us to obtain customer feedback, early in the process, and aggressively attack technological risks;
   
• Managing risk proactively, assessing and attacking risks and communicating them to project stakeholders before problems get to the point where they might threaten the project; and
   
• Performing daily build and smoke tests to catch any potential problems early on.

This approach not only results in a higher quality final product, but also reduces development time, as it takes less time to fix bugs early in the process than to let them seep into the design and development and then fix them. Regular peer reviews are conducted to make sure the code fully complies with our standards.

CP: What sort of business solutions do you offer to your customers?

AG: At GrapeCity, our focus is on making our customers successful and helping them achieve their business goals. Our first step is to develop a thorough understanding of our customer's challenges and objectives. Next, we find the best solution for that particular customer. Then, using best software industry practices and our proven Shinkansen Process Framework , we help them implement that solution. 

As a Japan-based company, we have a strong emphasis on ensuring the highest quality across all of our business solutions. By tailoring our offerings to each customer's needs and following through to make sure the solution is properly implemented, we help our customers' businesses flourish.

Our business solutions include:

ERP: We provide complete implementation services—including requirement analysis, customisation, data importing, integrating existing systems, training, and deployment—for two manufacturing ERP solutions. Microsoft Axapta, an ERP solution for medium and large organisations, can be tailored to support the exact needs of your manufacturing business, while delivering a low total cost of ownership (TCO). Intuitive ERP is a complete ERP system designed and priced for small to medium manufacturers.

CRM: We provide complete implementation services—including requirement analysis, customisation, data importing, and integration with existing systems, training, and deployment—for two CRM solutions. Microsoft CRM, available with both customer service and sales modules, helps companies provide top-quality customer service, make better-informed decisions, and increase sales. Pivotal CRM is a complete CRM platform and application suite designed to be cost-effectively tailored to fit the unique requirements of every enterprise.

LeySer Services for School Management: The broad functionality and ease-of-use advantages of LeySer Services for school management have made it the number-one software package for private schools in Japan. Installed in more than 2,500 Japanese schools, LeySer has an 85-percent market share among private schools that have accounting software. We offer LeySer software both as a hosted service and as a licensed product.

Infor Automotive Solutions: Through a strategic partnership with Infor Global Solutions, a worldwide provider of enterprise business solutions, we offer two highly specialised solutions for automotive OEMs and suppliers in China - SupplyWEB, for supply-chain management, and COM, for in-depth ERP functionality. We combine these best-of-breed applications with our implementation expertise and in-depth knowledge of the local market to offer a complete solution for automotive companies in China.

Application development: Our Microsoft certification credentials and extensive experience in working with both Java and Microsoft technologies (including .NET and the Microsoft e-business platform) enables us to create sophisticated solutions—both Web services-based and client/server—to help our customers run their businesses more successfully. We have developed financial, distribution, sales, process management, utility, and mobility solutions; migration software; corporate portals; and many other specialised business solutions to help our customers run their businesses more efficiently and profitably. We also provide consulting services for large software development projects, recommending the best components and technologies to accomplish the project's goals. Our use of best practices, embodied in our Shinkansen process framework , ensures that solutions will be of the highest quality.

Mobile application development: Mobile application development services are one of our areas of specialisation. We have developed custom applications for a broad range of mobile platforms, including Microsoft Windows Mobile, Microsoft .NET Compact Framework, J2ME, C++/Brew, Symbian and Palm.

CP: What are the current trends in the mobile application development segment?  

AG: The current trends vary but the ones that are already out have been gaining wider grounds in the subcontinent. Mobile gaming generated over US $100 million in 2004. According to a new study from Screen Digest, mobile gaming generated US $100 million in revenue in 2004. Mobile gaming is biggest in Asia, while the growth is slowest in Europe. The study predicts that mobile gaming will continue to grow, reaching revenue of US $640 million by the end of this decade. Mobile gaming has finally emerged this year as the legitimate consumer market that many insiders had predicted for years. Gaming giant EA entered the mobile game market in earnest earlier this year, with plans to launch four of its biggest titles in mobile versions, including "The Sims."

Both location-based services (LBS) and mobile commerce (m-commerce) have fallen off the wireless industry's radar screen in the last two years. We expect both of these technologies to make a return in 2005 thanks to advances in both handset technology and wireless networks. Nextel has proven that there is a consumer market for LBS, and I expect more carriers and handset makers to push the technology this year. Look for carriers to experiment with a variety of LBS offerings, including in-car navigation systems, improved listings and directories, and services for tracking other wireless users, including children.

Financial services firms and credit card companies are once again looking at m-commerce. New contactless payment systems and improved wireless networks will make offering these systems easier than when carriers first experimented with these systems in late 2000 and early 2001. I don't expect m-commerce to be the new ringtone, but we do think it will make headway as a trend.

Also the business prediction is that Mobile TV will overwhelm 3G networks by 2007 . According to a report by Analysys, the expected popularity of mobile television will overwhelm 3G networks by 2007. The study argues that if 40 percent of subscribers watch eight minutes of video per day on their mobile phones, the data requirement would exceed capacity on 3G networks. These networks are divided into cells, so if 500 people in the same cell want to watch the same video clip, the network must send a copy of that video clip over the network to each user. Although mobile television has not yet hit it big with consumers, operators have invested billions of dollars in constructing 3G networks that aim to provide the infrastructure for e-mail, music, and video services.

There is another rumour that mobile growth might drive IT spending through 2008. According to a new report from researcher IDC, US IT spending is on track to grow from US $41,700 million in 2005 to US $49,700 million in 2008. Two trends are expected to fuel this growth. The first is compliance with new regulations, including Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, and Basel II. The second is the growth of mobile devices and applications in US businesses and organizations. IDC predicts that mobile data will become a "must-have function" with traction growing in several verticals including government, financial services, healthcare, and media.

CP: What are your expansion and investment plans in India?

AG: We plan to double our revenue in the next two years; expand operations in Delhi and Bangalore; establish new offices in Mumbai and Pune; verticalisation into pharmaceuticals, legal, construction, health care, financials and biotech. Further, we plan to make investments in our current building as needed, including additional space at the current location.