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Our fiscal year ended March 31, 2006 and we are currently
tallying up the financial results of what seemed like
a solid growth year. Our growth came in many areas,
but some are memorable: |
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Singapore
- Thanks to the tireless
efforts of the India HR team, led by our Managing Partner,
Ashu Chadha, the Asia-Pac region has been set for at
least a tripling in size during this year - maybe more.
For those of you who have landed in Singapore this year,
thank you for bringing your talents to our team. From
our clients' perspectives, you are truly the best in
the region, but we know you are the best in the world. |
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Innovation
Grows - The SpreadBot team has two
production instances, a great achievement in 2005/6.
And rumor has it that another license is pending from
a global investment bank. We'll wait and hope, but this
is an example of an integrated global team leveraging
our strengths to offer innovative solutions to our customers.
Meanwhile, the CreditDimensions team has been quietly
growing at 400% year-on-year, winning important engagements
at Citibank, Credit Suisse and State Street Bank and
Trust - again the rumor is that more is to come! Finally,
the IDS Support solution has begun to take root, landing
us a new relationship at Morgan Stanley with the promise
of more to come. |
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Sales
and Marketing - Eight months ago Sanjeev
decided to ratchet up the marketing image of the firm
and the infrastructure he created has begun to yield
dividends. Please join me in welcoming our new director
of Marketing, Alison Kane. In addition to leveraging
the intellectual capital that Sanjeev and the Communications
Group have created, Alison will be developing an out-bound
calling team from our India COE to further spread the
news of our unique solutions. |
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Client
Growth - In 2005 we experienced strong
growth in every client relationship - Primus, Prudential,
UBS, Citibank and Credit Suisse were all significantly
higher in revenues than the prior year. As our practice
leaders continue to demonstrate success and process
discipline, our customers are taking notice and giving
us more business. |
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Entrepreneur
Practice Launched - 2005/6 was the year when we
gathered a critical mass of entrepreneur clients. We are looking
forward to refining our offering model to support these challenging
assignments while retaining our process control and client satisfaction. |
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Looking forward, we have much to do. As I have indicated in the
previous months, I have high expectations of this team, and here
are some challenges we need to work on: |
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More
Innovation Programme Success - We want 5 more license-related
sales in 2006/7 from Spreadbot, CreditDimensions, IDS Support
or the future solutions which are to come. |
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Better
Process Contol - As we grow from 300 to 600 professionals,
the need for scalable processes and support will be challenged.
The successful future lies in UniRAD, not do-it-yourself
workarounds. Join the UVS discipline and help grow the business
for the long term! |
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More
Geographic Reach - We must diversify our clientele
in our existing countries and land new clients in new countries.
This is the year of our global sales growth. With a combination
of reinforced marketing collateral, time-proved industry
solutions, and investment in sales conferences we aim to
break ground in at least 2 more countries in 2006/7. |
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Innovative
Training Approaches - In the next few months you
will begin to see our latest investments in achieving more
informed people. The change is exciting and it will offer
each individual the chance to reach their professional summit
while offering project leads with a scalable knowledge base
to grow and maintain team excellence - with a little luck,
we might even create a whole new affiliated solution company
called LessonOnDemand.com. |
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In conclusion, it serves as an inspiration for me to see the ebusinessware
teams around the world growing in size, in professionalism and in
diversity. Our company is envied by many and few can match
our unique offering of IP-led solutions, industry expertise and
global reach. Let's make this company a raging success in
06/07.
Edward Hoofnagle
Group Chairman and CEO (USA)
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Creation of ebusinessware
Center of Excellence (CoE), a highlight of 2006, Q1 |
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2005,
a year to remember: Year 2005 concluded
as another year of growth for ebusinessware family in
the areas of revenues, profits, clients, projects, technologies,
promotions, transfers, profit sharing, and above all,
in the satisfaction and confidence level of all our
associates. We see it as ebusinessware Happiness Index,
termed after the gross national happiness index of Kingdom
of Bhutan. Not to underplay, our partners saw 2005 as
the year when they all made the highest windfall of
their career. As always, joy of ’05 culminated with
Ed’s customary visit to India in December to make our
Annual day a success. |
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2006,
a preview worth looking at: We will
be considering adding more dimensions to this growth
phenomenon; more departments, business lines, geographies,
and marketing regions. |
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Markets:
We will explore more regions this year where financial
and related industries are on the rise. In the month
of May, we will be show casing our expertise in Sydney,
Australia as we join big NASSCOMM conglomerate of delegates.
Australia has always been outsourcer to India but lately,
has been considering India offshoring in many more ways. |
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Business
lines: Knowledge Process Outsourcing
has been considered as the next big thing in the field
of outsourcing especially offshore outsourcing. We are
well poised to take advantage of this because of our
immense subject matter expertise as opposed to most
of our competitors. We have been zeroing in on many
of these areas and you will be hearing more about it
in near future. |
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Departments:
We expanded our services successfully in the asset management
area last year because we saw industry opportunity.
This year seems to be an unprecedented year where IT
skills will be of tremendous shortage world-wide. Because
of our name, experience, and relationships in many of
the important player countries on both the demand and
supply side, we have decided to venture into this area
in a formal way. Few more departments are being considered
by our sales and marketing division. |
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A
quick run down of following items will give you an insight into
what has been achieved in 2006, Q1 and what is being contemplated
for the rest of the year. |
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Expediter –
Specialist Operating Model: Company is growing at
such a pace that no one can afford to lose momentum leaving no scope
for errors in our internal operating model whether the flaw is in
terms of sales proposals, pre or post sales support, presentations,
demonstrations, marketing material, resource requisitions, interviewing
processes, hiring, on boarding, immigration and travel logistics,
internal documentation, infrastructure management, training delivery,
EIS, project delivery, release management; list goes on but not
unknown to any one of you.
Therefore, CoE movement is in full swing both at offshore and
onsite. New operating model involving “Expeditors & Specialists”
was introduced recently. Having understood their roles completely,
all of them are already devoting their time to it earnestly. All
we (rest of us) need is to do is to sustain as well as improve
this working model over the next few months working closely with
young and energetic Expeditors and Specialists to make these best
practices our second nature.
There is no downside in following this model while the upside
is huge; i.e., speedier and zero defect results in all aspects
of operational tasks within or between all shores, all levels,
all disciplines, and all departments i.e., HR, Recruitment, Training,
Infrastructure, EIS, Content management, Projects deliveries,
etc.
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Re-organization:
As a result, some reorganization was done at offshore, few departments
were divided into multiple ones. Clear roles and responsibilities
were defined and explained and everyone involved has been moving
at full speed.
I am assuming all of you have looked at this model listed in
CVS \UniRAD-CenterOfExcellence-eHR\ebw-Admin-Operations. The entire
working of this model has been finalized but is constantly being
updated to reflect the details in writing. Please visit this area
often to enrich yourself with new guidelines.
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Innovation Program:
While the implementation of CoE stemmed from one of our Innovation
Program’s (IP3), there are many more initiatives that
have been considered ever since Edward Hoofnagle encouraged everyone
in the company to start thinking out of the box and showcase ebusinessware
as an exemplary solutions oriented company. |
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Marketing campaign
geared towards potential clients: Creation of vast
amount of marketing material in the form of brochures supplemented
by recent and future creation of flash movies about our primary
strengths is a continued step in that “IP” direction. Alison Kane,
over the last few weeks, has gained momentum, and is working on
making our name known in innovative ways through various PR agencies,
reputed industry journals, and companies the likes of Gartner, Forester.
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Marketing campaign
geared towards future joiners: Marketing material
as well as a newly created ebusinessware welcome kit and campaign
to create our name in all regions of India has been very successful.
More efforts are needed to sustain and take this initiative forward.
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Newly discovered
brilliance of what ebusinessware HR can do: Our
HR has worked relentlessly towards achieving what could have been
called just a fantasy few months ago. In short, they fought head
to head with the best and the largest offshore companies to attract
brightest of candidates from all over India and Singapore, short
listed them using immense and much appreciated teching help from
our technology leads in India before presenting them to one of the
largest banking powerhouses in their expanding Singapore division.
We are midway through that hiring drive for this banking powerhouse
which has labeled us as one of their most trusted and reliable strategic
partners. |
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Offshore PR
efforts: Our offshore efforts aimed at resource
market, government officials, influential agencies in the areas
of IT, and even clients in both India and Singapore have paid off
very well. We have established good working relationship with American
Embassy and NASSCOM in Delhi, and Ministry of Manpower in Singapore.
Our HR receives large number of qualified resumes from all over
India and Singapore regularly with the notes that narrate how impressive
ebusinessware is as per our web site information, clientele, excellent
projects, marketing collateral and above all, as per their friends,
peers, direct reports, and supervisors alike. These resumes come
from candidates who are fresh in nature from the institutes like
IIT and the like as well as from senior professionals working at
large multinational companies. Some of the large multinational companies
in India have also approached us to provide them with our services.
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Infrastructure
Excellence: We all have always wished for the infrastructure
related improvements in ebusinessware and few of you have even wanted
these to be world-class. Traditionally infrastructure improvements
mean big money. But “IP3” call from Ed encouraged our
people to think out of the box and find inexpensive but effective
“open source” ways to work towards that unthinkable. By now, we
have achieved a lot and even moving towards more improvements. These
include communication improvements between shores to say the least
utilizing to VOIP, ePBX, Skype, Exodus, eFax, remote printing, etc.
to their fullest potential. |
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All of you are encouraged to add to your wish list any additional
items that will help make our CoE better. |
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Training:
Training is taking a new meaning in ebusinessware; it started with
the creation of EIASE; lot of content was created, many of you worked
in as faculty. By now, scores of sessions encompassing different
courses have been imparted, hundreds of recipients of these courses
have gained enormously. |
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We are taking EIASE to the next level by introducing a new product
called aTUTOR as the delivery vehicle. We are also making our content
more commercial looking using state of the art techniques. A comprehensive
list of courses that we should have in our program is being created.
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All of you are encouraged to add courses from your wish list so
that a comprehensive curriculum can be prepared this time. All volunteering
efforts to take one course at a time and add content to it are appreciated.
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EIS:
EIS is taking an all new meaning in the organization. With the creation
of Dashboard being the delivery mechanism of high level EIS it will
become more visible and easily available to everyone. Detailed EIS
information will still be available in the backend via CVS as before.
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Once again, all of you are encouraged to add to your wish list any
additional items that will help make our CoE second to none.
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Content Management:
This is a new offshore department to plug the backlog of information
required for comprehensive EIS and to maintain its integrity going
forward. As we all know and appreciate good data input leads to
accurate and objective decision making in the all areas be it in
project quality measurement, profitability calculations, meritocracy
based remunerations, accurate and honest representations to clients
and regulators. |
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Next steps |
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Volunteers are required in one or more of the following: |
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Role |
Come up with new ideas, discuss, create roadmap, and follow it thru
with a comprehensive implementation or Come up with the offer of
volunteer time to help in the implementation of available ideas.
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Disciplines |
Volunteers are required to play different roles in the areas of
EIS, Content management, Infrastructure, EIS, EIASE, Process improvements.
No prior special skills in these areas are a pre-requisite. |
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All of the work in these areas is exciting, rewarding, and above
all, your give back to company, IT community and society.
Sanjeev Midha
Group President and CTO (USA)
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 Conferences
FIMA 2006, New York: CreditDimensions exhibited
at FIMA's Premier North American Reference Data Conference where
we showcased our Enterprise Reference Data Management System through
a one page advertisement, a demonstration and our CreditDimensions
brochure. There were over 125 attendees at the conference that are
specifically focused on reference data. Edward Hoofnagle and Gaurav
Malik presented and demonstrated our Enterprise Reference Data Management
System to several of the larger financial institutions. A subsequent
mailing was sent out to all of the participants and calls are being
made to secure meetings for a full demonstration of the system.
Edward Hoofnagle was interviewed by Securities Industry News as
part of our Market Awareness focus. |
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CeBIT 2006, Sydney: Ashu Chadha and Alison Kane
will help Sanjeev Midha at CeBIT 2006 in Sydney to showcase our
offerings to this new marketplace as well as new client base both
in and outside of the financial services arena. CeBIT Australia
is Australasia's leading Information & Communications Technology
(ICT) event for the business marketplace and covers the entire spectrum
of technology and the key elements that make up the ICT products
and services marketplace. This is the only Australian event where
you can explore the full range of next generation global technologies
and solutions. In its fifth year, CeBIT Australia 2006 will attract
700 exhibitors and 30,000 business visitors. |
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Advertising
Prestigious and hard to advertise Waters Magazine has agreed to
propagate our name for both the May and June 2006 issues. Waters
publication is exclusively for financial executives and readership
includes job titles such as CIO, Head of Equity IT, Chief Portfolio
Managers, Head of Trading within Brokerage, Custodian, Hedge Fund,
Regional Banks as well as other financial institutions. Over 10,000
copies of the publication are distributed within the US, London,
Chicago, Frankfurt, Hong Kong as well as other major global cities.The
May ad is strategically placed on the inside front cover. The advertisement
is also going to be used as the backdrop for our tabletop exhibit
at the Credit Derivatives Congress: April 24-27, 2006 and the SIA
Technology Management Conference: June 20-22 both in New York. The
advertisement was created in India under the direction of Alison
Kane by Sudhir Jagtap in record time. |
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Gartner Survey
Sanjeev Midha and Alison Kane participated in a Gartner Survey entitled,
"Financial Services & Customer Data Integration" that was recently
published. Gartner is the world's leading provider of research and
analysis about the global information technology industry. They
provide data, advice and opinions to 45,000 clients worldwide representing
9,000 distinct organizations, deliver 2,000 consulting engagements
a year, and hold more than 50 annual events that draw in excess
of 31,000 attendees. Our clients include chief information officers
and other senior IT executives in corporations and government agencies,
as well as technology companies and the investment community. The
survey did not include the names of participating firms but our
participation was important for future endeavors with Gartner as
we position ourselves as an industry leader going forward. Additionally,
participation in Gartner surveys has proved to be a useful tool
when making sales calls to potential and current clients. Our next
effort is to meet with the Gartner Analysts and be part of the Gartner
Magic Quadrant so each opportunity to participate in surveys takes
us one step closer. |
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Our efforts in the first quarter were to identify targeted conferences,
publications and analysts within the financial services sector.
As we embark on the second and third quarter of 2006, we hope to
tie our marketing efforts to new client contacts that result in
new business and increased industry awareness so that ebusinessware
and CreditDimensions becomes a vendor of choice.
Alison Kane
Director Marketing
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IP3 Article
Series - This is a new series of articles focused on our IP3
Innovation Program. Everyone is invited to contribute articles to
this series. Write to ebw-news@ebusinessware.com
with a paragraph about the topic of your article.
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How EBW Infrastructure is being shaped to
support the IP3 Program
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 We
help our customers to improve their productivity with the systems
that we build and maintain - why can we not do this for ourselves?
This has been the thought process in evaluating a huge number of
open source projects and hand picking those that make the most sense
for us. This article will focus on these new Infrastructure components
and how each one of us can make their best use.
ebusinessware.com
- For a long time we had been running our site with
static html and flash pages hosted on a web server. To support our
growth, make the site more professional and the need to make changes
to the site at a faster rate it was necessary to move to a Content
Management System (CMS) that supports a publishing workflow. Costs
of commercial software like Vignette are phenomenal. After a lot
of research, over the Christmas and New Year period we moved to
a CMS based on Drupal - an open source product. Those who volunteered
for this initiative have benefited from getting a first hand knowledge
of Content Management Systems. It is now possible to publish our
ideas to the website with just a few clicks! |
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ePBX - PBX stands for Private Branch Exchange - something that has
existed for years in the traditional telecom world. These are the
systems that respond with recorded greeting and let you dial extensions
or choose options to route your call. The hardware costs for such
systems created a high barrier for entry - until now when we ran
into a world-class IP PBX - Asterisk. Implementation did not take
long. Many of you may be aware that we now run an ePBX at our India
office. Call (646)862-1590 from the US to give it a try. Those at
the India office can get a soft-phone X-Lite extension installed
on their desktops to receive and make calls. No more waiting in
line for phone with international dialing or VoIP. Call directly
from your desktop! |
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Outgoing Mail
Server for India - As we continue to grow, the bandwidth
requirement in India also continues to grow. This is mainly because
all of our systems are hosted in the US. The first service to be
made available on the local Intranet to the India office was the
outgoing SMTP server. Although we continue to receive emails on
the US server, those at the India office now have a choice to use
a local SMTP server to send out emails. Contact HelpDesk if you
are not using this facility. This should improve your experience
while sending emails. Coming Soon to a server near you - CVS! |
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Start using these services to enhance your productivity
and make the most of the IP 3 program. Even more important
- get involved in the implementation of these initiatives to enhance
your knowledge on such systems and in return all your colleagues
will thank you for improving their productivity. Where in the world
will people thank you for enhancing your own knowledge - only on
the Fourth IP of our IP 3 program.
Rajesh Abhyankar
Director Annuities and Sales CRM (USA)
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 ebusinessware's
innovative product, SpreadBot has been acclaimed by some of the
financial industry's leading users, other prospective clients
and acknowledged as an innovation in public platforms such as
NASSCOM (National Association of Software and Service Companies
in India). The only broker email price parser of its kind, SpreadBot
transforms broker email spreads into structured time series data
with one click. This leads to huge benefits to credit derivatives
desks through a painless marking procedure that takes the hassle
out of daily closing.
SpreadBot's
automated parsing engine ensures secure, auditable and restorable
data handling and leads to tremendous saving of time and expensive
resources who would otherwise be engaged in manual and error-prone
method of manipulating information from emails. An important feature
of the enterprise-wide scalable engine is accessibility to real
time live data that can be integrated into any existing or future
trading or decision support system. The product combined with
ebusinessware's services, creates a complete, comprehensive and
open system on the market that can offer high value and notable
productivity increases.
Paromita Ghosh
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Movement within ebusinessware global locations was in tandem with
the overall fast paced growth in the first quarter of the year.
While Vishal Narain Singh, Sameer Khanna, Tarun Kumar Sharma and
Taruna Tyagi relocated to the US from India to take care of project
responsibilities onshore, Jatin Ahuja, Sujit Kant Thakur, Rahul
Rastogi, Jyoti Juneja, Vineet kanotra, Deepak Singla, Nitin Talwar,
and Siddharth Gaind geared up for responsibilities in ebusinessware's
operations in Singapore. |
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 Over
the last 6 months, ebusinessware designed and created well over
30 Marketing brochures, same number of Case studies, Numerous advertisements,
lengthy Flash movies, extensive and charming pages for different
Websites, enhanced Power point presentations, wonderful Calendar,
formatted Business letters, and hundreds of 2-D and 3-D Images and
Clip art items. All of the work was done from scratch in-house without
any external hand. Most of these artifacts were created within a
very short notice. What does it mean, ebusinessware added lot of
creative assets to its repertoire for future re-use.
All of this was tirelessly performed by one person. Please join
Ed and Sanjeev in congratulating Sudhir Jagtap for receiving the
Employee of the Quarter Award for his relentless
efforts. Sudhir, you are a model ebusinessware associate. By obediently
working of all assignments ranging from simple typing to high-end
designing under all sorts of stressful conditions, you have proven
that there is no substitute for positive attitude. It is a pleasure
to note that Parul is taking after you. |
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New year arrived with more happenings as the contribution of the star
performers led to due recognition and promotions across the board: |
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Steering
staff supplementation services, global HR and admin operations,
Ashu Chadha, became the Managing Director and Managing Partner,
Asia Pacific |
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Shrikant
Dixit, Vivek Chandola, Asheesh Sharma, Gaurav Malik, and Rakesh
Singal became partners of the company. |
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The young members of the team were not far behind. Srikant Tamatam,
Aseem Narula, Nagraj Thota, Rajeev Ranjan, Manas Pradhan, and
Sudhir Dhingra became Associate Partners. |
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Promotions at the offshore center followed with:
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One of the latest initiatives at ebusinessware started with the
launch of the electronic HR or e-HR. Keeping in sight phenomenal
growth over the last year and increased range of services in staff
supplementation, e-HR is totally focused on automating processes
to increase efficiency and usher in transparency in operations.
Facilitating tracking of open issues for both external clients and
project directors and partners, e-HR is yet another step towards
ensuring total commitment to quality. |
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Clear definition of roles and responsibilities for all functionaries
at the Center of Excellence and regular generation of reports to
track issue handling and productivity have added a new dimension
to best practices at ebusinessware. |
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Infrastructure expansion with the addition of new premises at the
Center of Excellence in India is testimony to ebusinessware's continuous
expansion. A total of 3300 sqft was added to the existing 14200
sqft of office space. With the inauguration of the new floor, state-of-the-art
facilities awaited an expanded data team. |
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In its constant quest for innovation and excellence, an award has
been declared under the aegis of the Innovation Programme by ebusinessware
senior management. The award will be given to any individual or
a team for the development of a product or a complete solution set
for interanl or external purpose. |
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The 2005 Annual Day event marked an important milestone in ebusinessware's
history. Group Chairman and CEO Edward Hoofnagle's message on the
occasion outlined the vision behind further growth and expansion
of ebusinessware. The event brought to the fore the recognition
of contribution of ebusinessware India team members who received
citations from the Group Chairman in various categories. An important
part of last year's Annual Day was renewal of ebusinessware's commitment
towards community service through an NGO fostering learning among
underprivileged children in India. |
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Group President and CTO Sanjeev Midha's visits to India in the first
quarter charted a new growth path for the communication group. His
vision and implementation guidelines to the team ensured streamlining
of functions and effective production of marketing collateral, both
for print and electronic media, to cater to sales and marketing
efforts in the global locations of the company. |
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During Sanjeev's second visit, the e-HR initiative was launched
with an Organization Structure Model that has won acclaim from
a reputed consulting firm with global presence. The rapid implementation
of the model through well-defined workflows led the way to a smooth
transition to electronic HR within record time. The benefits of
the automation and the launch of an effective tracking mechanism
for resource requirements and global movement have begun accruing
to various project teams.
Partner and Director, Credit Derivatives Sandeep Singh visited India
in the first quarter of 2006 to facilitate knowledge transfer in
a number of projects undertaken for a leading US investment bank.
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and Managing Partner Asia Pacific Ashu Chadha's Singapore visit
early this year led to strengthening of ties between ebusinessware
and its clients in the region. Ashu spearheaded providing professional
services to Credit Suisse, a leading global investment banking group
which resulted in rapid expansion in Singapore operations. Subsequently,
Group Chairman Edward Hoofnagle and Ashu Chadha visited Singapore,
in February 2006, for final implementation of expansion of ebusinessware
Singapore facilities. On a follow-up visit by Group President Sanjeev
Midha and Ashu Chadha in the month of April, further growth plans
were firmed up. |
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Expansion at ebusinessware US and India has been a matter of pride
for the organization in this quarter. While growth has been a constant
factor in ebusinessware's operations for more than half a decade
in a row, the numbers achieved this year are phenomenal. Expansion
of operations necessitated a team expansion by more than 60 members
at the India Center of Excellence in the first quarter of 2006,
while the US team grew with the onboarding of around 25 members.
Singapore division is more than quadrupling in size. ebusinessware
is anticipating its growth pattern to continue. We have filed for
a staggering number of H1-B visas and more are being considered.
ebusinessware welcomes each new member in this growing team!
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