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 Pallabh
Chatterjee, executive vice president-worldwide
development, i2 Technologies spoke to Prashant L Rao about
how the company is planning to move half its development activities
to Bangalore and consolidate its five Indian Development Centres
at a single campus
*
What are your plans for India?
We
are making a strong commitment to our Indian operations, and
will shortly be adding 150-200 people to our workforce in
the country. The aim is to increase India’s contribution
to development in i2. As per our plans, 50 percent of our
development activities will take place in India (most of it
in Bangalore, a bit in Mumbai) and the rest in the US. We
plan to set up a world class facility in Bangalore, where
we will consolidate people who are currently working at four
different locations in the city. Our goal is to double the
number of developers we have from 600-650 to 1,100 by Q1 2002.
Our main facility will be in Bangalore with satellite offices
in Mumbai, Chennai, Calcutta and Pune. We will be subcontracting
work to our partners and foresee significant growth in Japan
and A-PAC. The new centre at Bangalore will directly support
these two markets.
* You were the
pioneers in SCM. Today every ERP vendor is rolling out a SCM
product. How does it feel?
Imitation
is the sincerest form of flattery. We were the pioneers and
now we are introducing the concept of Dynamic Value Chain
Manage-ment the next phase of Supply Chain Management. The
idea is to take your entire value chain and make it more efficient.
This implies propagating visibility across the whole chain
of manufacturer to supplier to the end customer. A key factor
here is velocity, which is the speed of propagation across
the chain. Using DVC management you know the availability
of inventory across the entire value chain. It’s all
about how fast you as a company can react. Each member of
the chain is a corporate entity with its own decisions to
make. Today, propagation of information across a chain can
take sixty days. Compare that with a Dell that gets the same
information in two hours. DVC is the way to deliver on the
transaction and inventory on top of whatever ERP system you
may be running.
*i2 and IBM have had a number of wins together. Tell us
about this relationship.
A.
We have a very good relationship with IBM. There are three
parts to this relationship. The first is that IBM uses our
SCM software internally. The second is that we use IBM middleware.
Finally, we go to market with IBM Global Services. This relationship
has grown since March 2000. We have good relations with Sun
and HP as well as alliances with the Big Six consulting firms.
PwC and Accenture have i2 practices.
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