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Founded in 2000, GlobalLogic is a prominent company in global software product development outsourcing space. The company provides full product development lifecycle services to start-ups, emerging, and established technology companies. GlobalLogic is backed by venture capitalists- Sequoia Capital India, NEA, and New Atlantic Ventures. Headquartered in Vienna, Virginia, with sales and software R&D centers across India, Europe, and Asia; GlobalLogic employs around 3,000 professionals worldwide. Besides telecom, the company is also working in other domains like medical devices to entertainment systems.

GlobalLogic's client partners include both emerging and established technology companies, such as Autodesk, BroadSoft, Electronic Arts, Intalio, MobiTV, Motorola, NextPoint, Vertica, and Sony Digital. In the last three to four years, company has acquired Lambent Technologies in India; Bonus Technology and Validio in Ukraine; Dalian 3CIS in China; and InterObject in Israel. Recently, it started an offshore development center in Argentina, it's first such center in Latin America.

Jim Walsh recently took over as chief technology officer of the company. He has the vision to make GlobalLogic the best software development organization in the world. This effectively tells us about the changing role of a CTO, which is not just focused on technology, but on other business and performance aspects as well. We spoke to Jim Walsh, to find out more about the company's ICT infrastructure. Excerpts

Please give a rundown of ICT infrastructure used by your company?
We have state-of-the-art global IT infrastructure, and highly technical staff offering 24x7 support. There are well defined policies, and procedures in accordance with ISO 27001 for information security management system. We have redundant Internet links, with firewall supporting browsing/downloading/VPN requirement. All GlobalLogic locations are interconnected with each other, using multiple ways MPLS/VPN over Internet as per the requirement, and to maintain redundancy. We also support site-to-site and client-to-site VPN using Cisco firewalls. Network is divided into multiple VLANs, and InterVLAN data access is restricted for security reasons, and also to avoid spreading broadcast in the entire network. The MPLS circuits, site-to-site links, Internet links are rigorously monitored on 24x7 basis.

We have an extensive infrastructure to support our agile product development methodology, which we call 'Velocity'. The Velocity toolset consists of best-of-breed commercial and open source development tools, which GlobalLogic has enhanced and integrated to provide cross-geographic project status visibility and collaboration features. Being a development organization, we have tremendous technical depth, as well as visibility in market trends. This allows us to exploit social networking, advanced knowledge management, web 2.0 interaction paradigms, and other advanced approaches to improve employee collaboration, information capture, and utilization. We are migrating towards SOA/enterprise service bus architecture for all corporate applications, so that we can more easily provide real-time integrated financial, HR, and project metrics to our clients.

What are the upgradations that you are considering?
We are looking at upgrading our infrastructure internally. We have outgrown a lot of infrastructure that we have; so we are working on ways to improve our internal systems, reporting systems, HR systems, and internal infrastructure in a more serious way. We are also investing in knowledge management. We have been doing knowledge management for our customers, but we are planning to do it for ourselves; so we plan to appoint more social networking principles internally within the company, so as to keep us more connected with each other.

What are the main technological challenges that you are facing today?
We are always looking for great people. Right now, we have about hundred open positions in India, and in a couple of months we will have 400 positions open. This is one of the biggest challenges. Most of the people come from services companies. We only develop products, and developing a product is really different from providing services; so finding people with right product orientation is our number one challenge for sure.

Besides, Nagpur is our center of excellence for mobile devices, and also our internal IT application development center.Technologically, how to provide information infrastructure to current 3,000 employees and to 10,000 people in few years- is our biggest current challenge. It is an ongoing process.

What is your disaster recovery plan, if any?
We replicate all our financial critical data and customer critical data. For example, replication of some critical data comes from Noida and Pune, and that replication takes place at the block level every night, sometimes more often depending on criticality of the data. We also have replications among our centers in Noida for other customer critical data. We have back-up systems which are on less suspension boxes, so that we don't have to trigger. We have launched such a system in our Noida center, in case of a problem . So our data is replicated within our infrastructure. In future, we will be moving to cloud basics. On the number of critical systems our customers accept it as it is a secure and safe place to store their critical data. So we will be using replication systems, and back-ups from our files to our facilities for disaster management. It also helps in performance management in terms of connection.

Besides, we are unique in the sense that we make best practices for one segment of the bracket, and then cross pollinate them in another segment, which is pretty unique and exciting.

Being a product R&D firm, which are the technologies that excite you today? Which are the technologies you feel are going to change the landscape?
I am pretty excited about location based services and augmented reality. There are basic things that are to be done in those areas, mostly research projects, but I think it's going to be tremendously exciting. For example, small firms can work with mobile devices that have compass built in; so that they have directional sensitivity, GPS for location sensitivity, and camera. If you look through a camera at a building, it displays history of the building, address of the building and companies that are working in it. There are other devices also- like you can wear location sensitive eye glasses, and I find them tremendously exciting. It has a lot of commercial value.

We are using web dot zero concepts to help deliver contents for mobile phones, in their state-of-the-art like content distribution network. We carefully pick learning from one domain, and pass it on to another. We are recently working with a market research technology firm, that makes report available on best practices, which help customers to revamp their old information architecture. We help them produce the best information, that is targeted towards customers of particular demographics.

Gagandeep Kaur and Archana Singh
gagandeepk@cybermedia.co.in