Listen to this articleDear Readers,
Greetings from Silicon Valley where I just returned from my trip to India with a presence at India’s Silicon City of Bangalore where Kovair participated in the SPM-ICON annual event on IT Project Management at the Taj Residency Hotel from Oct 29-30. Kovair was the Gold sponsor for the event, along with IBM as the Event sponsor and Microsoft as the Platinum sponsor. We were glad to be in the company of these two great companies and with a booth at the event, we were able to interact with many of the Who’s Who of India’s IT Services companies. My summary account of the event is posted on our blog at: https://www.kovair.com/blog/.
Since our last newsletter, we have made great progress along the IT service management solutions front with a webinar by Bob Aiello — a well-known industry consultant and Sky Basu, our CTO, on the topic, “Why Implement ITIL Based IT Service Management?” On the ITSM implementation front, we just completed an implementation at Hexaware of a total solution with three levels of escalation, a thorough SLA monitoring with elaborate computational capabilities and a total workflow management implementation for management of ERP issues tickets. Hexaware supports three major ERP vendors and their customers as a third party service provider using the Kovair Service Platform. This is an example of a “Shared Services Model” per Hexaware CIO.
This newsletter also contains an update about our activities in Australasia by Ravi Gadhia, Director of Kovair Australasia, who provides a great account of our progress in those markets since we instituted our presence there in May 2009. It will make for good reading whether you are in Australia or not, as he discusses the use of Kovair applications from a different non-ALM or ITSM perspective. It is more on the business management types of applications where Kovair can be considered for successful outcomes as well!
Thanks for reading this and we wish all our readers in North America a very Happy Thanksgiving holiday let’s be thankful for a year that could have been worse but did recover with a global effort by all parties and authorities in their respective positions. We at Kovair are certainly thankful for that.
Sincerely,
Bipin Shah
CEO & Chairman
Kovair Software
www.Kovair.com
Kovair in Australasia
By: Ravi Gadhia, Director of Kovair Australasia
In this month’s newsletter feature, we invite the reader on a journey to distant lands where the light of Kovair has begun to shine. In June 2009, Kovair opened an office in Melbourne, Australia, as the regional headquarters from which to grow within the Australasian region. The leadership team comprises Dr. Richard Satur—an Australia-based computer scientist and entrepreneur, Bipin Shah —Kovair CEO, and Ravi Gadhia—yours truly. To date, we have generated numerous successes and would like to share this story with readers here.
Regional Partner: Customer Systems International
Not unlike most other places in the world, consumers of enterprise software systems in the Australasian region expect and even demand local representation by vendors, like Kovair. Knowing this, we made a strategic decision to focus our efforts on channel sales by partnering with established local resellers/distributors and leveraging their relationships and expertise. As a direct result of this approach, Kovair has established strong ties with Customer Systems International, a VAR in the CRM (Customer Relationship Management) space, which has led to interesting collaborations manifested by new solutions built on Kovair technology.
Omnibus Adapters for CRM
In the October edition of this newsletter, Kovair VP of Engineering, Atanu Majumdar, discussed the Eclipse Plug-In for Kovair Omnibus, so hopefully we are all familiar with the virtues of Omnibus, one of the key differentiators which set Kovair apart from other offerings. Customer Systems International has stepped up to become Kovair’s first partner developing Omnibus adapters using Kovair’s Omnibus API and is now developing Omnibus adapters for CRM products, Sage Sales Logix and Microsoft Dynamics. As such, we anticipate that Kovair solutions will soon be able to incorporate tight coupling to these CRM products, to bring the workflow-based task management and other Kovair benefits to CRM users.
Project Management Workspace
A notable development on the solution front is the product of a joint effort with our first South Australian customer, Business South Australia, based out of Adelaide, SA. Together, Kovair and Business SA are creating a Project Management (PM) Workspace which is based on the foundation set by the well-known Project Management methodologies, PMBoK and Prince2. The Alpha Version of Kovair PM Workspace was unveiled recently at the October meeting of the PMI Chapter of Adelaide. Some highlights on the PM Workspace are as follows:
- Provides new applications for Project and Stakeholder Management;
- Incorporates traditional applications related to Requirements, Issues, Risks, and so on;
- Leverages Kovair’s Microsoft Word Add-In to automatically generate Project Charters and Weekly Status Reports;
- Uses Kovair’s Microsoft Project Add-In for manual scheduling of tasks via the familiar Gantt chart interface of MS Project;
- Delivers executive level summaries via Dashboard Widgets.
Please let us know if you are interested in seeing a live demo of the Beta Version of the PM Workspace!
Agile Workspace
Since we are on the subject of Workspaces, it may interest you to hear that Kovair has crafted an extension of its popular Application Lifecycle Management solution that incorporates Agile methods. This Agile Workspace automates various elements of popular Agile methodologies, such as SCRUM, Sprint, Planning Poker and managing SCRUM Teams. Our very own Dr. Richard Satur defined the concepts for this solution, drawing on his extensive experience as a practitioner of Agile methods leading large development teams. Thanks to Richard and the rest of the Kovair team (with a special recognition to Soumanil) for this excellent innovation.
Kovair Goes Green!
We are very excited by a new project in which Kovair is developing a call center application using the Kovair Enterprise Solution linked to Microsoft Dynamics, Microsoft Sharepoint, VoIP technology for the Queensland TravelSmart initiative. With a goal of fostering sustainable outcomes, the aim of this project is to efficiently target and convert car travelers to alternative forms of clean transport. Kovair is proud to be making a difference by supplying the workflow technology to power this Call Centre.
Looking Forward
Though we are approaching the end of the calendar year, our work is far from over! In the coming months, the footprint of Kovair in Australasia will continue to grow. In response to customer demand, we look forward to establishing offices in Adelaide, South Australia and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia very soon. To follow our progress, please feel free to subscribe to our blog at https://kovairaustralasia.wordpress.com/.
