Steps and process involved in moving and building an enterprise-scale software product in India.

1. Great Leaders take Risk
Building a
World-Class Software Product Development
Team in India
Sanjeev Kumar
VP, Engineering & Head, India Technology Center
BEA Systems India
August 2007
BEA Confidential. | 1

2. BEA Systems Inc. – Introduction
The Middleware Company
 “BMW” of Infrastructure Software Industry
 “Software that customers use to build their software”
 FedEx, DHL, WFB, PG&E, eTrade, Verizon, NYT, ideaCellular, Railways
Brands & Products
 WebLogic: WL Platform, WLS, WLW, WLP, WLI, WLCP, WLEvS
 AquaLogic: ALSB, ALBPM, ALUI, ALER, ALDSP, ALES, ALSR
 Tuxedo: Core (/T, /Q, /WS, /Domain, /M, /HA), SALT, Jolt

3. BEA – A History of Risk Taking
1995: Tuxedo Purchase from Novell
 Helped crystallize the middleware market-segment
1998: WebLogic Inc.
 Bet-the-company acquisition, created J2EE app server market
 Best value-creation via acquisition (till VMWare acquisition)
2001: CrossGain & Westside
 Web Services, Controls & IDE; Did not meet expectations
2006: WebLogic Integration (WLI) in India
 All engineering functions to be done in Bangalore

4. WLI Move to BEA, Bangalore
India R&D Center
 About four years in operation
 Initial teams focused on sustaining engineering
 Currently 2:1 split in favor of mainline projects
WLI Functions at BLR Lab in 2006
 40% of development projects
 Most of QA, sustaining engineering and backline support
Risks
 Ownership of overall design and code-base
 No prior record in release and program management
 High degree of interactions and dependencies (“chatty-ness”)

5. Engineering Team Parameters
Balance in Product & Technical Expertise (“DNA”)
 Mix of new hires from similar product or competing companies
 Few senior engineers with a three-year history with the product
 Skills coverage on all the building-block technologies used
Balance in Team
 Small “pyramid” teams, anchored by experienced engineers
 Technical Depth, Energy Levels, “Can-do” Attitude & Motivation
 An environment for technical discourse and a “positive echo”
Coverage in all Functions
 Development and QA are well understood
 Release Management: inter-team interactions & dependencies
 Program Management: bridge customer-view and product internals

6. Placing Bets on People & Team
Individual Level Roles
 Developers taking on new or unfamiliar sub-systems
 An QA engineer learns to be a release manager (“herding cats!”)
 An architect from an ERP product company steps up as program mgr
Performance as a Collective (Engineering Team)
 Weekly local product team meeting covering all functions
 Ability to break-down high-level requirements into manageable chunks
 Estimation of schedule at task, intermediate milestone and release levels
“External” Interactions as Growth Opportunities
 Critical customer situations: leads visiting serious deployments sites
 Local beta customers: feedback loop on functional & operational aspects
 Local training courses: leads conducting Q&A sessions with customers