Profiling a 4-time award winner of the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 Asia Pacific program: Geodesic Information Systems Limited .

Every year, Deloitte's Technology Fast 500 Asia Pacific program identifies technology, media, and telecommunications companies that have achieved the fastest rates of revenue growth in the Asia Pacific region during the past three years. The program also evaluates the quality of a company's management team, competitive leadership and market size, its potential and overall financial strength. This program is supported by Deloitte's Technology Fast 50 initiatives, which rank high growth technology companies by location, in seventeen locations outside the United States (there are 27 distinct Technology Fast 50 geographic areas in USA) with Central Europe being counted as an eighteenth region.

The Technology Fast 50 programs have brought many companies in Australia, China, Hong Kong SAR, India, Indonesia, Japan, Macau SAR, Malaysia, Philippines, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam in the limelight.

Judging by the 2006 Asia Pacific survey, tech companies are doing exceedingly well. Apparently, the 500 fastest-growing technology companies in Asia Pacific recorded an average three-year revenue growth of 399 percent. Not bad? Well, India - especially its software sector - seems to be on a roll! When companies were ranked by industry and location, the maximum number of software companies (precisely 27), were located in India.

Focus on India: Geodesic Information Systems Limited

We profile one of these companies, Geodesic Information Systems Limited, placed 82nd on the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 list with a revenue growth of 453.61%. Not bad?! Within India, Geodesic was awarded the 7th place in the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 India 2006 listings.

Further, Geodesic also bagged a place in the Deloitte's Fast Technology 500 Asia Pacific listings in 2003, 2004 and 2005. In 2005, Geodesic was listed 172nd with a 3-year revenue growth of 318 percent. In 2004, it was 117th with a 3-year revenue growth of 293 percent. Evidently, Geodesic is not only keeping up a tradition, but improving its productivity every successive year. No wonder then that Geodesic has also featured in Deloitte's Technology Fast 50 India lists and in the Red Herring's ‘Top World 100' small cap technology companies in 2005.

So what exactly does Geodesic do, to achieve such consistently high growth rates? Apparently, its name reflects its mission - building a global community without barriers by connecting people across multiple platforms, devices and operating systems, that is, across the world.

More pointedly, the name Geodesic is derived from geodesy, the science of measuring the size and shape of the earth. Thus, a geodesic is the shortest route between two points on the surface of the earth, or a segment of a circle.

Let's chat!: How does Geodesic aim to fulfill its mission? As a software solutions company, Geodesic has combined bright ideas and breakthrough thinking to come up with path-breaking communication and collaboration solutions. For instance, its flagship product Mundu Messenger facilitates universal instant messaging by successfully combining AIM, Google Talk, ICQ, MSN, Mundu and Yahoo with deep content collaboration across the Internet, wireless devices and platforms.

What does this mean? Simply that Geodesic has truly got under the skin of instant messaging and come up with a solution - Mundu IM V3 - that combines the interoperability of IM services (AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo) to provide consumers with a seamless user experience. So irrespective of whether you and your buddies have IM accounts on AIM, ICQ, MSN or Yahoo, as Mundu Messenger facilitates cross-conferencing, you can all chat across all the IM's in the same window. There is no need to log into different IM accounts. Further, Mundu Messenger comes with a dual desktop/ mobiletop dashboard and a browser alternative, thus allowing users to define the way they access, share and collaborate information. Mundu Messenger also enables real-time collaboration between trusted lists of IM contacts across public IM networks on the Web, Desktop and Mobile Phone.

Talk to your heart's content!: Mundu Speak is yet another Geodesic product that offers unlimited talk-time access using Voice over IP (VOIP) on a smart mobile phone. The application is based on the practical observation that mobile telephone is easy and comes naturally, whereas using VoIP by plugging into a computer via a headset is neither easy nor natural. An invitation only service, Mundu Speak allows a user to experience
voice using a phone's regular 2G and 2.5G data networks. For more details, or to start using Mundu Speak, visit www.munduspeak.com

Mundu IM Referral enables a message to be simultaneously broadcast across multiple public IM networks. Bearing in mind that public IM networks have more than one billion users, sending a message using Mundu IM Referral comes across as an easy and effective way to get the word out - such as when marketing a new service or product. Further, the service integrates with any webpage, desktop client application or mobile phone application. Thus, as an example, Mundu IM Referral can offer social networks an explosive growth tool to create valuable referrals without requiring the consumer to leave the target site. Apparently, just one user referral can reach upto 400,000 users over IM.

Get the word out!: ADePT is Mundu's online advertising solution for online portals and their advertisers. It serves contextual-based ads on Mundu applications and other websites and as such, is of great use to social networking and similar sites. ADePT does not only serve-up ads, but facilitates an entire ad campaign management and positioning.

Today, more than 6 million users through associate sites, system integrators and partners are using Geodesic's products. Geodesic Information Systems Private Limited, or Geodesic, has indeed come a long way since being established in April 1999 by professionals with over 60 man years of experience in the Information Technology industry. In 2000, Geodesic was taken over by B V Holding Limited, a company in existence since 1982, but the emerging entity is known by the name, Geodesic Information Systems Limited.

Since 2000, Geodesic has grown from strength to strength. It reported consolidated revenues of Rs 1004.1 million for the year 2005-2006 and net profits after tax of Rs 402 million. Listed on the National Stock Exchange and Bombay Stock Exchange in India, Geodesic is headquartered in Mumbai yet its 180+ team is globally spread out - in offices in Bangalore, US, UK, Sweden and Hong Kong.

Reaching out in more ways than one: Actually, serving domestic and overseas prestigious clients such as Indiatimes, Alleance Victory, Sharekhan, Girvan Institute (NASA Affiliate) etc has required Geodesic to fan out across the world. Hence, Geodesic's subsidiaries, such as Picopeta Simputers and Engage Solutions Limited came into existence. Like the parent company Geodesic, these subsidiaries have innovative, visionary objectives and own proprietary technology solutions.

For instance, PicoPeta, a company founded by the co-inventors of the Simputer, was named by MIT's Technology Review magazine as one of the 7 hottest academic start-ups of 2001. The vision of the co-inventors of Simputer is to make computing affordable and accessible to people of developing countries who face barriers of price, language, and literacy. Thus, building on this vision, PicoPeta envisions a connected world with the Simputer as the building block.

Building connected communities: A dream that is practical, hence do-able. Consider this - the Simputer provides affordable computing power (up to 10 times the processing power of a regular handheld computer) to build large mobile IT solutions at a fraction of the cost normally associated with such projects.

PicoPeta's role is not merely limited to supplying the hardware for the Simputer, it also provides developer tools and technical information needed to develop Simputer applications. PicoPeta also has the expertise to build software solutions on the Simputer platform, and provides project management, consulting, and system integration services to help industry in this goal. In order to keep the software solutions simple for illiterate people to use, Picopeta's team includes experts on human-computer interaction, who have years of experience in making easy-to-use applications and devices. For instance, a touch screen interface helps do away with traditional input devices such as a mouse or keyboard, and the development of a standardized interface language called IML (Information Markup Language) and icon-driven interface further help ensure that the Simputer will not ‘put off', so to speak, illiterate villagers.

More value-add proprietary technology: Yet another Geodesic subsidiary is Engage Solutions Limited, a Hong Kong based company established in 2000 specializing in the provision of software products and services primarily for the financial services industry. Engage Solutions counts seven leading Asian-based financial institutions - that is, in Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore and Korea - as its clients. Its enterprise product - Spyder, an end -to-end marketing life-cycle solution - incorporates a set of appropriate internal and external communication, record keeping and other tools to keep pace with and align services to clients needs, so as to retain a customer base.

Other subsidiaries include Geodesic Information Systems AB (formerly Clangula IT AB of Sweden), a premier enterprise workflow solutions management company established in 2003. Its flagship product - CITflow - focuses on delivering value by helping corporates increase corporate productivity by offering innovative, high-quality business process and workflow management software which helps decrease turnaround times of tasks by 80 percent and thus, increases profitability.

Making a mark: In addition, Geodesic Information Systems Inc (GISI), USA and Geodesic Information Systems Pte Ltd. (GISPL), Singapore, are two subsidiaries working to market the Geodesic product range in new markets and develop more business opportunities.

Evidently, Geodesic Information Systems Limited scores both on account of its consistently high revenue growth, as well as its ownership of proprietary technology that has contributed to the significant growth of the company and its subsidiaries. It is meeting its mission of building widespread, trusted communities. A laudable feat indeed!

For more details:

http://www.geodesiconline.com

http://www.mundu.com 

Charu Bahri is a freelance writer and author of two books. She also writes funding grants and software for a charity working in the health sector. 

Issue BG70 Jan07

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