While worldover configuration management (CM) is emerging as a key tool for effective software life cycle management, India is still to catch on with this trend. Sarathi Srinivasan, president, Spectrum Software spoke to Punita Jasrotia about the role of the SCM market in today’s business environment, the company’s offering, and its benefits across the varied industry segments

What is SCM? How does it work?
To understand the Source Configuration Management (SCM) tool, it is important to know what configuration management (CM) is all about. CM is a disciplined approach to managing the evolution of software development and maintenance practices and their components as they change over time. Management of software development becomes more difficult as the application under development becomes larger and more complex. A CM tool is the one which has the ability to support a developing software, manages the development of any object in the system’s life cycle (design requirements, documents, manuals), supports parallel as well as incremental development and also has the functionality to control and manage objects and processes.

How relevant is SCM today? What benefits does it hold for an organisation?
CM is core to any kind of software (applications, systems or e-commerce) and Web development (Web content, HTML pages, CGI scripts). A CM tool helps in increasing productivity through managed concurrent development and can also make change cycle time more predictable, enabling software release schedules to be more reliable. There is also the possibility of fewer bugs being sent out in delivered code and the company becomes more responsive to customer needs. Besides this, automation relieves developers of mundane tasks and managers get up-to-date information about the state of the project. So, any company that is involved in the development of software, websites and large-scale documents needs configuration management tools.

IT departments operating without CM tools are simply not effective or as productive as they could be with CM tools. Moreover, the lack of an effective CM tool can lead to immense problems. For instance, changes made to a shared file without informing others, existence of more than one version of a file, inability to keep track of what files go with which program and what changes were made to each version, etc. At times different programmers fix the same bug at different times or different programmers fix different bugs in the same file and copy over each other’s changes.

Our studies have shown that increasing complexities of the computer systems, especially those on the Internet, will create a crisis position in the near future and thus create a need for SCM. Additionally, the increasing market pressures and emphasis on quality are going to drive the adoption of CM tools. The market for CM tools is currently pegged at $2 billion and is expected to be around $7 billion by 2005. The annual growth rate for the product market is 50 percent.

What opportunity does India provide in the SCM space? What is Spectrum SCM’s USP?
The opportunity in the IT as well as the non-IT sector is immense. The changing business dynamics coupled with an added emphasis on quality is going to drive the demand for CM solutions. The reason why most of the people have not opted for a solution is because of the high cost attached to it. Most of the people have been using low-end tools, which they buy in pieces of functionality that often have integration problems. Whereas, on the other side, the high end tools are more expensive and complicated to maintain. All this only creates the need for a solution which caters to these requirements and that’s where we are trying to fit in.

Spectrum SCM is 100 percent Java-enabled and provides the benefit of being compatible to any environment, irrespective of the platform being used. This is coupled with a low-cost pricing model. The tool includes version control, process control/management, release management, branching, issue tracking and much more, all integrated in one tool and not as a bolt-on addition. The product also provides for customisation of project life cycles and change request attributes at the project level. There is also the advantage of being Web-enabled, which means an easy accessibility anytime, at anyplace.

What are your future plans?
We are trying to establish the concept and brand of CM tools in India. We have tied up with Tata Infotech, which is responsible for the sale of licenses and the after-sales support. Sensing the immense opportunity that India holds, we have set our initial target as 1,000 licenses for this financial year, which we are hoping to exceed. Once we achieve this target, we are sure that the numbers are just going to multiply. We are also looking at setting up operations in India but that depends on how soon we are able to achieve this target. We are surely looking at setting up Indian operations in the near future. For this we would be looking at an investment of $2-4 million and we are planning to tie-up with some strategic investors.