X-Mas Celeb beginz...

Fighting it out...

Another day out... but not an usual one, we were all geared up for the battle and hoping for some excitement on the field...

Yeah... It was the Paintball Adventure...located on the ECR which gave us a fun-filled evening...

There were four teams competing... Alpha, Beta, Charlie and Dynamics

The battles were incredibly exciting, shooting out the targets and painting them pink... :)

some were fulfilling their long time wishes ... :) aiming at their own targets... :)

Each team had itz turn with the other and the final winners were Alpha...

Paintball Adventure

Diwali Celebrations

Itz Diwali time ... and our office had a new look today morning greeting upon people with a refreshing rangoli.

The rangoli designs are symbolic and common to the entire country, and can include geometric patterns, with lines, dots, squares, circles, triangles

The rangoli was improvised by flowers like Marigold, cockscomb, Rose, Michelia_champaca(Sampangi) and Fern leaves...

Office was decorated with diyas... and was glowing all the day long.... :)

wishing you all a very happy diwali....

Rangoli Team:
Betsy
Sumathi
Sridevi
Banupriya

After slogging it out for one and half an hour, they got out this flamboyant Indian contemporary Rangoli....Many Congrats to them...

SAG-Chennai Tenure Award 2009

SAG-Chennai recently celebrated its 1st Tenure Award Event on 31st July 2009.

I am not sure whether many IT companies have this initiative(esp Indian companies...), and this event makes all the SAGians to feel proud.

Krish elaborated on the criteria for the tenure awards and Mahesh did gave the pointers for the best performance awards.

Below are the words from Johannes and Mahesh about the event and the nominees... :)

In the past 5 years, it has been a great journey for Infravio with 2 product lines (GE/X-Broker) and also going two through major acquisitions in the last 3 years. It has been a great journey for everyone in this organization as 60% of the employees have completed over 3 or 5 years. Considering the industry dynamics, any organization needs to be proud of this commitment from the employees. This is a clear demonstration of the team driven with the sense of passion to the product which continues to transform...

Needless to say, we have people like Karthik Shanmugasundaram, Jebastin Prabaharan, Shanmugam Vairavan has been the key contributors in the development of the Core components for the GE product line. They seamlessly transformed with the acquisitions in to the new product lines, technology bases and distributed development transcending the cultural borders.

5 year Tenure Awards:

Shanmugam Vairavan
He exhibited his commitment and passion in going through all the customer escalations in X-Broker… He was instrumental in getting the Schlumberger issues under control last year and continued his support for Dish Net & Echo Star escalations. He had single handedly maneuvered the X-Broker architectural issues through last year. He is a great asset to this organization but one has to pay attention to acknowledge his presence.

Jebastin Prabaharan
Has been a great contributor to the product primarily driving the policy engine. He has recently taken over the architect role for SOALink which speaks for itself...

Nithya Mani
She is THE earliest engineering member in the team. She has been a consistent contributor from the early days contributing towards the GE feature sets and also in to the migration of GE to ActiveSOA…

Karthik Shanmugasundaram
Very important player in the team as he is very vocal with his views and convictions. He spreads around the technology areas and the various components in the product quiet comfortably… He enjoys giving technical sessions and takes initiative to organize them. He was spreading around SOA Org, Import/Export, and Security in this year which is an indicator.

Padma Priya
Have been working on the UI area. She is very much focused with her work and has a good sense of humor. She is a great team player.

Natarajan Prabahar
Very good team player working on the UI functionality. Very enthusiastic in his area of work.

Wish them a successful career ahead with SoftwareAG.

Best Performance Awards:

Arunachalam Lakshmanan & Aravindhan Annamalai
Tamino adapter development was very interesting as the requirements were defined by R&D, no apriori experience in using ADK… Arun & Aravind did a marvelous job in delivering this functionality in such a short time for Suite FCS.
Keep up the good work.

Balaji Balakrishnan
He brought in his rich experience in streamlining the processes and delivery for GE/X-Broker. Has done a great job in addressing all the customer escalations and few customers have turned around to praise the product quality & performance. Commendable job in managing the 3 fix releases in the last 6 months! Now we have some happy customers for X-Broker!

Sidduraj Malligarjunan
Malli is the point of reference for any GSGE related issues. He is one of the few people who kept the CSGE forum alive and this is the testimony of his customer orientation. He is one of the few who fixed lot of CSGE issues. He is dedicated and flexible. His dare to do attitude is commendable. He is a good team player and has lot of respect in the team.

Vairavan Shanmugam & Sridevi Annamalai Sekar
DISH had performance issues with X-Broker. They had a high expectation on product performance and this issue was highly visible at the management level. Both Shanmugam Vairavan and Sridevi executed this assignment well under pressure and not only met but exceeded the customer expectations. This was well received by DISH.

Wishing all of you the best and hope you have a nice venue today!

Many Congratulations to Sethu, Stephen, Murugadas, Saravana, & Betsy for the awards.

For more snaps,

SAG-Chennai Tenure Awards

Karthik S on being with Rajesh

My Personal experience with Rajesh:

I joined infravio on Dec1 2003, and was introduced to Rajesh. He inspired me in the very first meeting with his speech. Even now I remember his words “Technologies and specifications alone not do business; you have to think to make use of them to do business"

I knew you had studied Design, patterns etc. How did you use in your college projects? Just because you come from Anna University nobody will respect you, I challenge you how fast you do those in the product going forward was from Rajesh and the talk was more technical.

I had to do some research on how I could write a RMI component that could be used across all application servers that supports JMX specifications. I came up with the proposal but unfortunately JMS was preferred after some time. Next I had a new challenge that I needed to persist the event and MBean data from X-Broker, Specification suggest a way. So I came up with the proposal using the specification and it was implemented. My first successful task in Infravio. Why I am saying this is, Rajesh keeps on challenging me that made me to work hard and even harder on doing new things which later became an usual thing.

Also I had an opportunity that only a few would have had as a fresher. Each and every line of code that I check-in was reviewed by Rajesh so I need to be very careful about performance, quality, coding standards etc when I code. That made me as a good programmer. But at the same time he allowed me (everyone) to think new things and accepting those ideas to be part of the product.

I still remember he kept saying to everyone, “Do work hard the way you do now, In the next 5 years you will be differentiated from others. You will feel the difference in the hard times like recession. Like these he kept saying so much of encouraging words that made the work environment so beautiful and made most of us to come even in holidays (Infravio had 6 working days. Only Sunday was holiday).... :)

He never hesitates to allow us to take new responsibilities. At the same time he groomed me (everyone) a techie other than coding and designing. He allow me to participate in important calls as a slient observer. Then after some time I automatically started participating actively in important calls. This kind of progressive guidance from him allowed me to become a good professional. He always wants everyone to write a new specification that could bring business. As a first step a few of us became member in OASIS.

Weekly meetings by Rajesh made us really to understand what is happening in the Registry market and where we were standing. The requirements from the clients were also discussed in those meetings which helped us to learn about the business world. Technical session and technical talks helped us to keep update ourselves with the outside world.

On the other side we had frequent outings like cricket, lunch (emptying somebody’s pocket), Each and every day we had coffee sessions where we kept talking some crazy things and some serious issues too. I hope lot of guys remember the lunch time spent with Rajesh. All these things kept us unite as a team and succeed as a team.

He was always inspirational and showed us the way to look forward. He is a very approachable person even for your personal things. His advice helped most of the people in solving personal problems. I could keep writing about him…. But there are other friends too… I would like to end this post by one initial experience that kept me 5 years in this company.

Rajesh told me one day, “From India we did not write a killer product. We need to prove the world that, in India we could innovate and do a successful product”. He was successful in achieving it to some extent. I am extremely happy that I was also a part of it. I have been so emotional sometimes while talking with him because I like him that much personally.