A blueprint to manage IT infrastructure

HYDERABAD: Circa 2003. What does a CIO want? Most would say larger budgets
and reducing TCO. Recent times have seen an increase in the IT
infrastructure-spend for most organisations becoming fairly routine and
companies vying to better each other in reducing TCO of enterprise software. But
according to CEO and founder of Cendura Corporation Pavan Nigam, what a CIO
wants today is a reliable blueprint for managing and supporting distributed
applications across the enterprise.

“Managing complex distributed applications across large enterprises without
a blueprint is like landing in an unfamiliar city without a map,” said Nigam.
Cendura’s enterprise wide, distributed applications management solution
Cohesion helps control a company’s applications management costs and increase
its applications uptime. According to Nigam, the product detects installed
software components, including custom software modules and builds a
comprehensive application blueprint. Encapsulating industry best practices,
documentation and dependencies all folded seamlessly into the blueprint
structure further enhances this blueprint.

Application blueprints enables development, operations and support teams to
see how an application is structured, distributed and configured. “This helps
in drastic time-reduction in identifying and resolving application failures. At
times from days to minutes,” he said explaining that accelerating
troubleshooting is critical to most organisations.

Nigam who co-founded Cendura with Tom Speeter is determined to make Cohesion
a blueprint standard across the industry. A daunting aim, however, Nigam is
optimistic. “We envisioned Cendura as a global company and in 2002 started the
India office simultaneously with the parent company in Mountain View,
California,” he said and added, “now Cendura is in mode expansion.”

According to Nigam, the company’s fully owned Indian subsidiary Cendura
Software Pvt Ltd, which is based in Hyderabad and where the product development
happens, will double its strength from the present 30 and the operations will
move to a new facility. The company which raised $ eight million in its first
round of funding is running the second version of its product Cohesion and plans
to invest $10 million in its India facility in 2004.

“The new facility will have hi-tech testing labs,” said Nigam who is
looking forward to building additional functionalities as add on modules on top
of its blueprint. “We will release the first such module by March 2004,” he
informed.

Cendura counts Verisign, Homestore and Planetasia as its customers. Nigam
emphasized that the product is meant for all verticals though some like
financial services and automobile industry have been more receptive to it.

(CyberMedia News Service)