NEWS: Indian American teacher-student duo run software firm

[Frederick Noronha <fred@bytesforall.org>]

Indian American teacher-student duo run software firm

by Ela Dutt, India Abroad News Service

New York, Jan 23 - The two Indian Institute of Technology-Delhi (IIT)
graduates were once student and professor at the prestigious Cornell
University, then they rubbed shoulders as colleagues, and now they have
co-founded a software company.

S. Keshav, chief technology officer and director of Ensim Corporation, and
Rosen Sharma, president and CEO of the company, moved from being professor
and student to colleagues at Cornell University, and then in June 1998, they
co-founded the software company Ensim, fielding new software platform for
hosting services.

Fourteen of them, professors and recent graduates from Cornell, loaded their
belongings into an 18 wheeler and set off for Mountainview, California, in
May 1999, where they set up shop on Shoreline Boulevard.

They outgrew the space by January 2000.  "We had to take people out for
walks when we had to meet them," Keshav told India Abroad News Service. They
converted a warehouse in Sunnyvale and raised $3.5 million mostly from
Indian American entrepreneurs willing to bet on the team. They raised
another $18 million soon after and ended a third round of an impressive $64
million this January 2001.

Sharma, 28, and Keshav, 35, are graduates of IIT, Delhi, where Sharma was
Keshav's student for a brief spell.

A President's Gold Medallist from IIT, Delhi, Sharma interrupted his studies
to found VxTreme, focused on client-server multimedia applications over the
Internet. The company was acquired by Microsoft in July 1997. He went to
Cornell to finish his doctorate but when he wanted to do a post-doctorate,
the chairman said he was too brilliant to stay a student and in an unusual
step, the university offered him an associate professorship.

Keshav finished his doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley,
in 1991, and returned to teach in India in 1993 on leave from Bell Labs. "I
felt I owed IIT something and contemplated moving back," he said. But
opportunity beckoned and he went back to Bell Labs, left with the breakup of
AT&T in 1996, and taught for three years at Cornell where his paths crossed
with Sharma's again.

Today Ensim gets its best talents from Cornell and IIT, Delhi. And recently
the company acquired CyberMedia India. Ensim now employs 140 people, 35 of
them at the India office.

"We deal with the day-to-day stuff needed to keep hosting services running.
Companies will need fewer people and can do things more efficiently and more
accurately," with Ensim software, Keshav explained.

"Our founding team was made up of three Indians, one Icelander and one
Chinese. When we had about 30 people we put up a map which showed we covered
practically every other continent."

The two continue to pay back to IIT by mentoring other start-ups in the
Valley founded by other IIT graduates. "We have a very healthy revenue this
year and an even better one next year," he added, and said that while
profits were very important, they were not the priority right now, nor is
going public," Keshav said.

"We have to walk this fine line between getting market domination and
profitability. As we become an established player, profitability will become
our primary goal. But at the moment this is not," he added.

The company is partnering with AlteonWebSystems, Cisco, Compaq, F-Secure, HP
OpenMail, Halcyon Software, Miva Corporation, Planet Intra, Portal Software,
Redback Networks, RSA Security and Sun Microsystems.

--India Abroad News Service