MOST WIDELY USED CLOUD TECH IS CONTAINERS

TECH I’D LIKE TO SEE

O f the cloud technologies that
have appeared over the last
fifteen years, containers have
% of backend developers using cloud technologies

Farm to fork – ensuring traceability

arguably had the greatest impact,
says SlashData’s latest State of the
Developer Nation report.
With 60% of developers using this
technology, the benefits are clearly
widely recognised. However, with
just under 30% of developers using
container orchestration tools and
management platforms, there is
still room for this technology
to develop
60 45 32 27
Our discussion this week is on
containers and Kubernetes, what
C onsumers nowadays
want to know about their
food’s journey through the
better efficiency, transpar-
ency and sustainability.
For instance, IoT-enabled
Database as Cloud Platform Container
Containers the opportunities are, how you supply chain – from farm to vehicles can track how food
a Service as a Service orchestration tools
can build your expertise in these fork. In this complex maze of is transported from the
happening technologies. We’ll be producers, manufacturers, manufacturing facility to
Source: Live on Facebook today, talking with Ameeta Roy, director, distributors, providers, and retail stores, while block-
26 24 21 SlashData, December 2, from 6pm to 7pm. solution architecture, Red Hat India, end-users, traceability calls chain makes the traceability
State of the
Developer Event page link: and Murad Wagh, director, systems for deep tech solutions that authentic, establishing trust
Cloud Cloud monitoring Virtual machines can assist in assuring food between the company and
Nation, Q3,
http://bit.ly/techieswebinar28 engineering, VMware India
functions services IaaS 2020, survey
safety and quality. Data- consumers. I’d also like to

WFH, growing need for digital

powered systems and data
portability across the food
supply chain will be the
game changers. While
blockchain or the inter-
see intuitive customer imag-
ing and facial recognition to
make the retail experi-
ence more personalised.
The only way to thrive

skills fuel on-demand job roles

net of things (IoT) alone in the food industry is
cannot solve traceabil- to be customer-centric
ity, when implemented and responsive to
together, they ever-changing
can enable demands.

Narendra Pasuparthy | CEO & FOUNDER, NANDU’S

include those of data scientist, AI
Some techies are HIRING NO LONGER CONSTRAINED BY GEOGRAPHIC BOUNDARIES specialist, data analyst, cloud en-
gineer and cyber security profes-
doing multiple The whole WFH in the last eight months has
fuelled the trend among companies
On-demand hiring is happening more for
digitisation projects that involve SMAC
sional. Nanduri says the demand
is more for digitisation projects
jobs. Labour law to look at flexible and creative options
for hiring. Candidates too are looking
(social, mobile, analytics, cloud). On-demand
workers are assessed on technical abilities
that involve SMAC (social, mo-
bile, analytics, cloud).
changes will at doing different projects. For this to
be a bigger change, laws around
only. Since their work is short-term, they are
paid 10-15% more than regular staff
Sachin Gupta, CEO of Hack-
erEarth, which provides a tech
accelerate trend labour, social security, need to change
Siva Prasad Nanduri | HEAD - IT STAFFING,
platform for hiring, says web de-
velopment, mobile app develop-
Sanjay Shetty | HEAD, STRATEGIC ACCOUNT TEAMLEASE DIGITAL
ment (requiring both frontend
MANAGEMENT, RANDSTAD INDIA
Swati.Rathor@timesgroup.com UST has been hiring for on- and backend skills), and data ana-
lytics are the top skills in demand

J
ayarami Reddy, 35, is a techie
with 14 years of experience.
He was hired by an HR firm
for an on-demand role as an
IT consultant in July. On-demand
– or as some call it, freelancing –
roles are short-term, for a few
On-demand is also a way to replace
the bench model, which in today’s
competitive times seems unviable for
IT companies. In the bench model,
companies pay salaries even when the
employee is not engaged in a project
Ajay Shah | MANAGING FOUNDER, REKRUT INDIA
demand roles in India, and globally. We
for on-demand roles.
have seen a surge in demand for digital skills
Venkatesh Radhakrishnan,
over the past three months. Technologies
global head of talent acquisition
like Java with Angular 7+ or microservices,
at IT services firm UST Global,
Java full-stack with cloud, Angular 7+, AWS/ says UST is hiring for on-demand
Azure, SDET have seen 20% increase in roles. He says technologies like
demand Java with Angular 7+ or micros-

days, weeks or months. Payment
is on an hourly basis. And you are
not tied to one company, you can
do multiple jobs.
Remote work that followed the pandemic
has made recruiters realise they are not
constrained by local boundaries. This will
How JFrog is
Venkatesh Radhakrishnan | GLOBAL HEAD, ervices, Java full-stack with
TALENT ACQUISITION, UST GLOBAL
cloud, Angular 7+, AWS/Azure,
SDET have seen a 20% increase in
The on-demand trend is increasing in high-cost demand in the past three months.

Reddy says this is the first time
he got into an on-demand role. It’s
for six months. “I didn’t negotiate
much, so my salary is just okay.
really boost freelance tech jobs in
India. Also, as economies recover,
they will look for low-cost options,
and many of those jobs will come
transforming the
locations. We are yet to see much of it On on-demand hiring portals,
in India, but I’m sure it will become there are many such roles avail-
important in critical functions, like testing able. On Wipro’s Topcoder plat-
automation, security, architectural jobs, form, there’s a role of a full-stack

But the job is flexible, it gives me
time to pursue other interests, I
get to live with my family in
Khajipet (Andhra Pradesh). The
daily expenses are much lower
here,” he says.
However, getting leave is a
to India
Sachin Gupta |
CEO & CO-FOUNDER, HACKEREARTH
stack development, DevOps, data
science and analytics. “My previ-
world of DevOps
cloud-related jobs; wherever there are no developer, with expertise in Java
microservices and Spring Boot,
data privacy issues
going for $750-1,150 a week. That’s
Ranga Pothula | SVP, GLOBAL DELIVERY SERVICES, INFOR for five months. There’s a data
scientist role going for $2,750-3,150
demand, and there aren’t enough a way to replace the bench model a week. That’s for four weeks. Sujit John & Shilpa Phadnis | TNN
In every boardroom,
people with such skills to be hired of IT services companies. “In the While the on-demand trend is

challenge and the job does not of-
fer benefits like insurance, gratu-
ity or PF. Despite this, Reddy does
not intend to take up a permanent
job in the near-term. “But next
time, I will negotiate better terms
of employment,” he says.
Raja Kumar Dakka, who has 12
years of experience, also recently
got into an on-demand role for an
IT company in SAP. He is based
out of Kurnool in AP and expects
there will be many on-demand
roles in the times to come. Ram
Prasad, who is based in Chennai
and specialises in supply chain
analytics, is working on two on-
demand jobs. He says opportuni-
ties are high in the areas of full-
Why Icertis is valued
ous employer cut salaries during
the lockdown, so I quit the job and
got two on-demand roles. Only
people with right technical com-
petencies can benefit from such
roles because companies pay on
the basis of number of hours and
productivity,” he says.
All three came across these on-
demand opportunities on job por-
tals or via HR consultancies.
They have been hired for terms
between six months and a year,
and the extension of their con-
tract depends on the require-
ments of the companies.
On-demand roles are rising.
Multiple trends are driving it.
Certain digital skills are in big
J
on a full-time basis. That’s an op- bench model, companies pay strong in countries such as the Frog’s DevOps platform is used
the CIO is being asked
portunity for those with these salaries even when the employee US, it’s still nascent in India, by many of the world’s biggest for faster solutions, more
skills to offer themselves to mul- is not engaged in a project,” he though Covid-19 is accelerating it. companies – Google, Amazon, secure solutions,
tiple companies for specific pro- says. Around 21,000 on-demand Sanjay Shetty, head of strategic Facebook, Netflix, Microsoft, deployment to
jects. This trend has been facili- jobs, he says, have been added in account management at recruit- Oracle. The company had a very the cloud.
tated by the remote working envi- the IT services sector this year. ment firm Randstad India, said successful IPO two months ago Those with old
ronment created by the Covid-19 Siva Prasad Nanduri, business that for this model to work, com- on the Nasdaq, and it is today infrastructure
pandemic. It’s easy to work for head for IT staffing in staffing panies need to adjust their ap- valued at over $6 billion. and
multiple companies sitting solutions firm TeamLease Digi- proach to tracking the output of The reason is, DevOps is hot,
methodologies
at home. tal, says currently most of their gig workers. “Besides, the govern- and likely to get hotter. That’s
“WHF (work-from-home) trig- customers are asking for 5% to ment needs to come up with some because we love apps that are
will not be able to catch up
gered by Covid-19 has taught the 10% of their overall hiring to be sort of `creative’ or flexible ap- simple to use and are secure. Shlomi Ben Haim |
IT sector new ways of doing busi- on-demand. Such workers, he proach towards providing gig That in turn is forcing compa- CO-FOUNDER & CEO, JFROG
ness,” says Ranga Pothula, SVP says, are assessed only on techni- workers social security with nies to fiercely compete to offer
of global delivery services at en- cal abilities. “Since their work is minimum documentation and us the most intuitive apps, apps DevOps needs a good
terprise software company Infor. short-term, they are paid 10-15% keeping in mind the erratic at- that eliminate confusing or ir- understanding of
Ajay Shah, managing founder more than regular staff,” he says. tendance cycle that would be ritating technical procedures, infrastructure
of recruitment solutions firm Re- Shah says job profiles expected prevalent in the gig world,” apps that have more features,
automation
krut India, says on-demand is also to see higher on-demand hiring he says. and yet don’t occupy much space
in our phones, and apps that are tools, like
very secure. Python, Bash,
IIT MADRAS TEAM WINS SAMSUNG’S CAMPUS COMPETITION
That requires continuous Node, Shell,
software updates. And the only Ruby, etc,
Samsung concluded its three-month-long EDGE campus competition last week. EDGE is a recruitment and
engagement initiative that brings together some of the brightest young minds from top institutes in India to
way companies can ensure that familiarity with tools like
is with DevOps, which seeks to Docker, Puppet, Chef,
provide solutions to real-time challenges. This year, 5,200 students from 20 institutes participated.

at $1 bn, and is used

make software development and Jenkins.
TECH TRENDS Kavita Viswanath |
HEAD, JFROG INDIA

by top global firms

operations, the software deploy-
ment, as seamless a process as
possible. JFrog offers one of the
most comprehensive platforms
to do that, with a lot of automa-
Avik.Das1@timesgroup.com Icertis’s platform helps overcome tion tools. “We built JFrog to
these problems. “We manage the en- solve developers’ pain points.
all companies today. This puts
pressure on companies to inno-
vate, to continuously and seam-
lessly update software, to pro-
vide the best customer experi-
ence every day,” she said. New

L
ast year, Samir Bodas and Monish
Darda’s Icertis, which provides
cloud-based software that allows
companies to manage all their con-
tracts, was valued at over $1 billion
when it raised $115 million in funding
from PremjiInvest and others. The
Pune-based company’s customers
include some of the world’s most sto-
ried names – Apple, Airbus, Best Buy,
Daimler, Microsoft.
One reason they all use Icertis is
that, being on cloud, it is easy to de-
ploy. It can be up and running in
weeks, unlike traditional systems
that take months. And it’s today na-
tively architected on Microsoft Azure,
so it’s secure, scalable and interoper-
able with all major systems.
Darda, who is also the CTO, says
when they started the company in
2009, cloud as a concept was just tak-
ing shape. “There were doubts. Ex-
ecutives wondered whether they
CUTTING EDGE
MADE IN INDIA
would lose control over security,
whether it would help lower cost. But
tire RFP (request for proposal) for the
clients to ensure they meet the com-
pliance and sourcing norms of every
country – whether they are using
slave labour, meeting environment
friendly production rules, legal re-
course,” says Darda.
Contracts across departments are
in a centralised repository and there’s
great visibility across every contract.
AI is used, among other things, to
analyse past negotiation history to
gain insights for improvement, and
to better understand contract rela-
tionships and their performance.
Ulrich Ochmann, an executive in
Daimler’s procurement division, says
of Icertis: “From sourcing to contract-
ing we have gained speed, and it has
made us safer. We have our risks
transparent, we have our process
transparent, and our buyers like the
software.”
Today, Icertis is in Gartner’s
Leader Quadrant, based on its com-
pleteness of vision and ability to
execute. The company manages 7.5
million contracts in more than 40
languages across 90 countries. The
software has played a key supporting
role in the acceleration of Covid
The pain point was, we have to age startups, she said, are pick-
build software faster, it has to be ing DevOps early. Many of the
secure, and it has to go to manage largest private banks, e-com-
all kinds of dependencies. All of merce and automobile compa-
the edge devices we use have to nies, traditional tech companies,
be updated constantly,” JFrog’s are all using JFrog significantly,
Mechanical engineering students Guhan CEO and co-founder Shlomi Ben she said.
Narayanan, Rishbha Jain, and Mukund Haim said at the Times Techies The Covid-19 pandemic has
Khandelwal formed the winning team from IIT Webinar last week. accelerated the use of DevOps.
Madras. They won a cash prize of Rs 4 lakh. Shlomi said when a large “With teams working remotely
They conceptualised a complete digital and company in India first contact- and less interaction and collabo-
contactless experience to buy and receive ed JFrog, they were releasing ration, reliance on sophisticated
Samsung products. Mukund said they started software updates once a year. tools and automation for software
by researching technology papers and doing The company said their goal is release cycles has pushed the bar
two surveys among young customers. The to release updates once in a and got businesses to get on to
survey found customers wanted to get a feel quarter. “When we did the proof this much sooner than expected.
of concept, they could release There’s tremendous demand
of the product before buying it, and they
updates twice a day. And now coming from India since the pan-
wanted a safe delivery mechanism. Rishbha
they are releasing seven times demic hit us,” Viswanath said.
said they visualised an online store with AR JFrog’s vision is to make soft-
a day,” he said.
capabilities that would allow customers to Kavita Viswanath, who heads ware so liquid that updates hap-
see if the size and colour of a product like JFrog’s India operations, said pen continuously, without any
a washing machine or refrigerator would An FMS Delhi team of Tushar Singhal, Sai Dinesh DevOps in India is not signifi- disruption to any ongoing op-
fit the space in their home. They thought of Chayanam and Chaitanya Ganu won the first runner-up cantly different from the DevOps erations in your device, and
a holographic service assistant in physical prize of Rs 2 lakh. They visualised an AR/VR solution transformation happening glob- without you even realising it.
stores. Guhan said for installation and
troubleshooting, they visualised an AR-
in the store that would simulate how a product would
look in the home. They visualised a self-guided store.
ally. “With software services get-
ting more and more complicated
“Software must flow through the
pipes like water. We want to up-
enhanced app that would guide customers And they conceptualised a physical store on a truck that with microservices and contain- date your phone, computer, air-
the moment they pointed their smartphone could come close to people’s homes, since customers are erisation coming in, these chal- c o n d i t i o n e r s e a m l e s s l y, ”
camera at the product. hesitant to go out. lenges are faced by pretty much Ben Haim said.

Ottalingam didn’t let his disability stop him

we decided that if we have to ride a
wave, it has to be on cloud,” he says.
Traditionally, contract storage and
management was also done ineffi-
ciently. Large enterprises have to
manage humongous numbers of con-
tracts. These contracts tended to be
dispersed across different depart-
treatments and vaccine development
as they enable pharma companies to
onboard vendors, partners, and trial
participants quickly and with confi-
dence that their contracts are prop-
erly managing risk. Ardra.Shankar helped a little. He could not stand started venturing out on his which completely turned his life
“Every client has a big team @timesgroup.com for long periods of time. If you get an own. The brave endeavour led around. For the first time, I
managing certification from suppli- After high school, he was star- opportunity, don’t hold to multiple injuries and frac- could go wherever I wanted, says

ments, making it difficult to achieve
consistency. This lack of visibility led
to increased risks and lower levels of
compliance with corporate standards.
It was difficult to discover patterns
and relationships across large vol-
umes of contracts without painstak-
ing manual review.
Monish Darda (extreme left) with the Icertis team
ers. We use blockchain to ensure
that as soon as the client receives a
certification, it is put in the block-
chain using a tool and then the
whole certification process for the
supplier can be managed by the
manufacturer in one place,”
says Darda..
I
n a world where people are
constantly erecting barriers
around you, Ottaling am
Satyanarayanan says, it takes
courage to not build one yourself.
Which is why he refuses to let his
life be defined by his struggle
with a cascade of physical trau-
mas, the most pernicious of
INSPIRATION
which struck in the form of polio
when he was merely 11 months
old. The disease left him with
severe paralysis in his right leg
and a slightly withered left one.
He underwent two surgeries in
his teen years, but they only
ing into an uncertain future. “I
couldn’t be at a construction site
as a civil engineer, or be up on
my feet all day long in health-
care,” says the Chennaite who
spent his formative years in
Delhi. “I desperately wanted to
find a career and live a normal
adult life.”
It was the 80s. Computers were
becoming popular in India. “When
I saw people sitting at a computer
all day, I realised it’s almost as if
they didn’t have legs. That all you
need is the right skills and a pair
of hands,” he says. Armed with the
latter, he decided to study
computer science.
back. Keep pushing yourself
to the limits
Ottalingam Satyanarayanan
| PRINCIPAL ENGINEER, CISCO INDIA
Unable to get into engineer-
ing, he ended up pursuing a
Bachelor’s in physics. But after
the course, he enrolled for a com-
puter science programme at
IISc Bangalore.
Ottalingam was still too
de pendent on people
around him, and he real-
ised they’re not going to
be there forever. It was
painful at first when he
tures, but he didn’t give up. He Ottalingam. “I never let my dis-
was finally able to commute on ability become a barrier, but it
his own. After graduating in always existed. But once I start-
1987, he moved to the ed driving, 70% of it was
US to pursue Mas- destroyed.”
ter’s from Univer- After his Master’s, he worked
sity of California, with a couple of tech firms in
Santa Barbara. Silicon Valley before joining
There, with the Cisco in 1999. Today, as the prin-
help of friends, cipal engineer of the collabora-
he bought a tion technologies group at its
hand-con- Bengaluru office, Ottalingam
trolled plays a key role in managing its
c a r, contact centre business unit.
“I’ll always be grateful to my
family, friends and mentors who
stuck with me through thick and
thin,” he says.