Veblog

Vegayan @ ANTS 2007

The ANTS (Advanced Networks and Telecommunication Systems) conference, involving active participation from stalwarts of global telecom industry was a big event to end the year. The conference conducted on Dec 17^th, 18^th at KReSIT, IIT Bombay (right below Vegayan’s HQ) was the best platform we could have asked for to showcase our products and their value proposition.

Vegayan’s booth attracted a large number of visitors on both the days and it was an amazing experience to present how Vegayan aims to change the global communications landscape. Many of the prominent speakers and participants at the conference were so impressed by Vegayan’s innovative technology that they could not resist coming upstairs to visit Vegayan Office to inquire in detail about Vegayan’s product portfolio and go through a product demo.

Vegayan played a prominent role in the conference, with its founder Dr. Girish Saraph moderating the service provider’s panel discussion on Day 2 of the conference. The theme of this panel was to discuss key technologies that will define service provider networks and upcoming services. The panelists were key people driving growth in the global telecom segment represented academic, carriers/service providers and equipment vendor communities thereby providing a holistic view of what would shape the next generation networks and services.

From L to R: Vijay Jain- Director, Broadband Operations at Ericsson India, Chris Buchanan- Solutions leader Voice & SMB at Nortel, Prof. Mohammed Atiquzzman- Oklahoma University USA, T.V. Sriram- VP at Bharti-Airtel India, Tushar Saxena- Director, at Verizon Communications USA, Neeraj Sonker- VP Engineering at Tata VSNL India, Arvind Mathur- Chief Architect at Sify India and Extreme R: Dr. Girish Saraph- Vegayan Systems moderating the panel

The event provided us with a lot of visibility, traction with who-is-who of Indian and Global telecom industry. It may potentially lead to many opportunities of strategic alliance.

Interview of Rakesh Mathur and his Vegayan Investment

Our Point of View

Vegayan has received decent stream of press coverage since inception. We have benefited and are thankful for it. We want to add few comments to bring our perspective to the recent articles.

SINE’s start-ups going global – Indian Express Nov 10th 2007

Our Take: For Vegayan the immediate and foremost goal is to have a good footing in the Indian Market first. Going global is the next logical step.

Indian start-ups find angel funding elusive – Mint Dec 4th, 2007

Our take: We certainly sympathize with the grand scheme of raising awareness about the startup plight in India as brought out by this article. However, we do not consider ourselves among the struggling bunch who are hitting the wall. Just to clarify few points in the article:

1) We started in late Nov 2005 and not 2003. Where as, in 2003 Dr. Saraph filed for US Patent on our routing technology and received patent grant in June, 2007.

2) We are well past angel rounds of $50-$75k (Rs. 20-30 lacs) . We won the TiE-DFJ India Venture Challenge in Feb, 2006 and received $75k in seed funding as award. We also won TiE-Canaan Entrepreneurship Challenge in Dec, 2006. Recently, we raised a significant chunk from our angel round (from Rakesh Mathur). The next stop is only going to be bigger and better.

3) Currently, our priority is on the customer front and do well in the on-going trials. That should open many promising options for us.

Success and Happiness – Dr. Hiru Bijlani

Last week Dr. Hiru Bijlani conducted workshop for Vegayan team on “Roadmap for Success and Happiness”. Dr. Hiru has a distinguished career as management consultant and trainer. He has authored many books related to the above subject matter.

It was not a typical lecture (“gyan”) from the management “guru” as, it involved high level of participation from our team members.

Things I liked in this workshop are:

1) We set out company goals and saw how each individual would play role in achieving it.
2) We talked about things that apply to our day-to-day activities related to work situation, relationship, health etc.
3) Everyone was encouraged to make affirmations which helps in bringing focus and building self-esteem.

There is lot more than this but, for those details go to Dr. Hiru website at http://www.successyogi.com

HAPPY DIWALI to all.
- Amit

IITB

The best part about my job is the IITB Campus. Reasons

• Regular stream of Who’s Who visits. I have spotted Ex. President of India Abdul Kalam, Ray Ozzie
• Lush green with vihar and powai lake. Once you get into the campus it feels like hogwarts if you ask me,
• It’s becoming the center of activities that interest me barcamp, opencoffeclubmumbai, seminars etc.

Simply put IITB Campus is Hip and Happening.

MySQL Installation – Issues

Here are few tips for MySQL installation, if the problem is of “mysql.host does not exist”.

Fatal error: Can’t open and lock privilege tables: Table ‘mysql.host’ doesn’t exist(we can find this info in /var/log/mysqld.log)

Follow the following steps, MySQL will be installed(all wrt Linux)

1. shell > rm -rf /var/lib/mysql

2. Install mysql rpms.

3. Go to directory where mysql binaries are installed(mysqld_safe, mysql etc)

4. ./mysql_install_db –user=mysql –ldata=/mysqldata (where mysqldata is my data directory for MySQL database. datadir can be specified in /etc/my.cnf file, then we can ignore here)

If it gives a message that hostname is not set or conflict in hostname, then use
./mysql_install_db –user=mysql –ldata=/mysqldata –force

5. MySQL is installed, start MySQL server now,
./mysqld_safe –user=mysql &

Congrats, MySQL is up and running….

When MySQL is Installed, MySQL client does not have any password. It will contain four users, root@localhost, root@localhost.localdomain, ”@localhost, ”@localhost.localdomain(” – anonymous user).
Delete all users at localhost.localdomain and all anonymous users. Set password for root@localhost using

shell > mysql

mysql > drop user root@localhost.localdomain;

mysql > drop user ”@localhost;

mysql > drop user ”@localhost.localdomain;

mysql > set password for root@localhost = password(‘mysqlroot’);

mysql > flush privileges;

mysql > \q

shell >

Flush Privileges will tell server that password is set for root.

MySQL is installed and password is set for mysql client.

Another feather in the cap … US Patent

Prof. Saraph was granted US patent on VS routing recently. Indeed it is a great personal milestone and acknowledgement of his innovation and expertise. But more so, it is a feather in the cap for Vegayan and its evolving story.

Value of intellectual property (IP) is often not adequately appreciated. Its potential for providing opportunities is rather underestimated and not typically seen in Indian Product Startups. It certainly gives us few bragging rights. The patent sends a clear signal that we understand the market dynamics and are among the first ones to innovate and offer the best solution.

So what is it worth?

Consider this, the capital and operating expenditures in core networks iswell over $100 billion globally. Any solution that brings efficiency in operation and resource allocation may bring substantial savings. Can this technology bring 5% or 10% savings? We have to see! But, even 5% reduction is huge! Can this enable better functionalities and services?

Again, time will tell!

Birdwatching @ IITB

I started birding in 2005. During 2005, I could not bird much as it required traveling to different habitats. However,after joining Vegayan Systems I could do birding as my office is located in IITB campus, which is very leafy in nature with a lake. There are very less vehicles around and probably this may be one of the reasons for good bird population in here.

I have seen many beautiful garden birds like Oriental Magpie Robins,Coppersmith Barbets and Purple-rumped Sunbirds, Rose-ringed & Alexandrine Parakeets, Redvented & Redwhiskered Bulbuls, Common Tailorbirds, Common Iora, Ashy Prinia, Greater Coucal, Common Myna, Asian Pied Starlings, Roc Pigeons etc along with ubiquitous Asian Koel and House Sparrows enroute to office in the morning.

I can see Palm Swifts fly around the Bottle Palm trees that dot the campus and few Dusky Crag Martins from our conference room. From my seat, I can watch, kites, rock pigeons and common mynas. This is a wonderful opportunity for a person like me as I am in the initial learning stage of birding.

My team members are very co-operative in my birding activities, Sometimes they join my bird walk, sometimes they lend their cameras, they helped in buying a binocular, they take pleasure in showing birds to me and even allowed me to set server hostnames with some of my favorite birds … it has been a great experience overall.

Evening I take my coffee from staff canteen. This canteen is surrounded with lot of green. This place is bit away from the office but I prefer to go there as on my way I get to see a flock of Jungle Babblers,Yellow-eyed Babbler,White-browed Bulbuls, tailor birds while, Spotted Dove in the shrubs, Coucals and Zitting Cisticola.

I have seen over 55 species during the course of a my rewarding stay here. You can see pictures of some of the birds at our campus here.

For a birder it is very important to watch birds of different habitats and so that was the reason I joined “Mumbai Bird Watcher’s” club. I also have a added advantage of learing about birds from experts. This birder’s club is great. We go for birding every weekend. I invited the bird club members to our campus for birding too. We have had 2 bird walks in our office campus so far.

You can read the IIT bird walk report and pictures here [ 1 / 2 ].

In the recent past I am spending more time on exploring and understanding the bird nests. On the other day I saw common iora’s nest in the garden here, it was a wonderful craft with camouflaged in the greenery !!!.For the first time I also saw a black drongo sitting in its nest in the branches of a high Rain Tree. Just outside of our office building, there is a black kite’s nest …. it is a wonderful experience of watching a young ones in the nest. Last winter some of us watched the coppersmith barbet building it’s nest just outside our building near the tea shop. I changed my tea time to suit the nest-building time of this bird. It usually appeared around 11:00AM. There use to be a couple of them, they took turns in building/pecking their nest on a dry stem of the tree.

Snippets from Workshop at Reliance

We visited Reliance Tech Innovation center at DAKC Campus for a workshop. I have been at the campus before, however this time I also visited their lab testing facilities. What a testing facility ? Mind-blowing !. Believe me it’s one sight , array of servers, routers, switches all stacked up and cabled. Definitely at par with the best of best by global standards.

The workshop was given by Dr. Saraph, it covered Enabling QoS and Operational challenges for MPLS networks.

We had interesting exchange of ideas and information. For me technical discussions post workshop were more informative mainly because of it’s one to one nature. We definitely gained more insight into how things works at NOC, as they addressed our specific queries. I thank the folks at Reliance for this opportunity and their hospitality.

New Hacker Dictionary….

This is “hacker dictionary” it’s really tome of knowledge….