Business Technology

Calcey Technologies provides IT solutions to top US firms

by Gamini Warushamana

Taleo Corporation, headquartered in San Francisco US, is one of the world's leading human resource development companies that provides on demand talent management solutions. The company faced enormous challenges when serving its clients across the globe in sharing its knowledge and past experience. Telco had a large volume of knowledge information related to solutions it provided to its clients, consultants, engineers as well as on an MS access database.

Taleo's sales engineers and customer service consultants had no easy access to this widespread knowledge base or find quick solutions from past experience. For example, a sales engineer in Germany may try to solve the same problem that was solved by their US counterparts a few months ago. Taleo wanted a system to share this most valuable knowledge database among its consultants around the world to improve the efficiency of the company.

Taleo outsourced to Calcey Technologies of Sri Lanka to develop a software to meet this requirement. Calcey Technologies is a Sri Lankan Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) company engaged in software development to the US market. CEO of the company Mangala Karunaratne prefers to name his business as Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO), since his team is engaged in high end knowledge business providing knowledge solutions.

"Taleo Vice President, global customer service Frederic Lequient wanted a functionality that allows his team to securely access, update and share information by its own staffing knowledge base across the organisation", Karunaratne said.

They also needed to reduce the time to knowledge, which is very important during a lucrative sales deal or important implementation cycles.

A reduction of time to knowledge directly benefits consultants and clients. Similarly whenever consultants leave Taleo they leave with the knowledge they have gained, without a knowledge base. When Taleo continued to grow globally the issue became more complex, he said.

"We dived straight into the problem and came up with a prototype within three weeks and delivered the solution within six weeks fully loaded with data. Our solution reduced time to knowledge across the organisation while managing the ever increasing volume of information,' Karunartne said.

The solution is a multi-tier internet based solution built on Apache Tomcat Application Server using an Oracle database.

The solution included security, knowledge categorisation, search, mining, data entry and knowledge based administration tools. Taleo solutions optimise the flow of talent throughout large organisations such as Honeywell, Hewlett-Packard, Dow Chemical, Blockbuster, Fortis Inc., Washington Mutual, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, Mutual of Omaha, Pitney Bowes Inc., PepsiAmericas, P & G, Thomson, Group Suez, Serono, Toyota, The Gillette Company, Bombardier, Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield, UnitedHealth Group, Wachovia, KPMG and Xerox, among many others. Taleo has received a number of accolades, including the industry's leading staffing solutions according to the HR.com 2003 Buyers Guide.

The remarks of Frederic Lequient would not only be a credit to Calcey, but also a testimonial to the new generation of entrepreneurs emerging in Knowledge business in Sri Lanka."Having the most robust functionality that allows us to securely access, update, and share information from our proprietary Staffing Knowledge Base across our organisations is very important to us as we continue to grow."

"Calcey's software development team, led by Silicon Valley professionals in Sri Lanka, brings a strong pool of high-tech talent based in South Asia, ensured that our offshore application development project was a smooth one.

The services and quality of their technology platform have been outstanding, delivering on budget and well ahead of my expectations", he said, in his communique to Karunaratne.

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Lanka needs to differentiate software industry

Sri Lanka needs to differentiate outsourcing business to succeed in the industry, said CEO of Celigo Technologies Jan Arendtsz. Celigo, a US company provides system integration and business solutions. The company recently signed a contract with Calcey Technologies to develop the Java based system integration solution.

Arendtsz on a recent visit to Sri Lanka in an interview with the Sunday Observer, explained the challenges and opportunities in the global software market.

He said that US companies coming here face a huge risk than India. India is a proven and huge market where infrastructure and professionals are excellent. Bangalore is like a US city.

Chennai and Hyderabad are becoming big IT centres. The competition from India is huge.

However, if you can build expertise in certain areas and say that we do this technology really well; we do BOP for small businesses really well, then you can grab a significant share from this vast outsourcing market, Arendtsz said.

Arendtsz said that finding developers in US today is a problem due to the short supply and therefore they come into markets such as Sri Lanka, where there is good talent. From a career standpoint, we wanted developers who will stay with us for a longer period. It will take a long time to train a person.

"I tried this with several medium size companies in India but, the problem there today is that Indian companies who hire developers can't hold them for a longer period, because the demand is high and salaries are very attractive as a result of big US companies going there directly, it is like a gold rush. Prices have gone up and it is much higher than what you find here in Sri Lanka," he said. According to Arendtsz, the software industry in India is not cost effective any more, especially for small companies that are outsourcing their businesses. Arendtsz said that his engagement with Calcey would benefit both companies.

Celigo provides the essential business intelligence and technical implementation expertise to simplify business for its clients and their customers in a cost-effective and high-quality manner utilising its lightweight methodology.

Celigo specialises in Enterprise Integration, with a set of proven solutions to integrate all types of applications in the enterprise using the latest industry Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) technologies.