Continuing his focus on innovation, quality and productivity to achieve targets aggressively

He gets a high developing world-class software products in India. The prospect of making the leap from programming excellence to end-to-end product development for large enterprises excites him. He is Shantanu Ghosh, the 'Product man.'

Says Ghosh, director, Bindview India Pvt Ltd and vice-president, Bindview Corp: "I have spent over eight years in designing and writing software for wireless communications, mobile computing and enterprise messaging and this is something that really excites me."

Today, Bindview provides IT security compliance software globally. More than 20 million licenses have shipped to 5,000 companies worldwide, spanning all major business segments and the public sector. The Indian R&D center has played a major role in providing the much-needed support to its parent company.

"The real challenge lies in solving real problems for customers. Here, the end result and process itself is exciting. On the other hand, government run projects are played on a longer scale where you end up becoming just a part of the process and that is not exciting at all," says Ghosh.

Ghosh gave up a lucrative career in DRDO where he had joined as an electronics professional. He soon knew that DRDO was not his cup of tea. He changed jobs with a couple of companies before joining River Run, where he headed the Product Group.

This was his forte: Designing and developing products. Ghosh was soon heading the Pune-based R&D center of Entevo Corp., which was creating a new generation of enterprise software products. In a year, Bind View acquired Entevo. 

Since then more than 25 releases have come out of the Indian center. Fifty per cent of the development work is done here and the focus has shifted from risk management to vulnerability products. 

Bindview currently has a 185-member strong product team here. There are plans for 25% growth. The Indian center has done well in other areas as well. Since BindView develops products for the security management, it is also expanding its US-based Razor team. 

This is a small group of security experts, usually drawn from the CIA or the NSA. With growing security needs, they looked for people in India. 

"The Razor team looks at patterns, known vulnerabilities. We also need to update on new software products being put out. In the US, we work closely with Microsoft, Novell and Unix suppliers, as strategic partners. It is important to locating it in Pune, says Ghosh, adding that the team was increased to about eight people. The US team has around five people.

Eventually, Ghosh would like to see himself heading a `Made in India' product company. His immediate goal is to continue focus more on innovation, quality and productivity - and achieve targets aggressively.

Nanda Kasabe