Okay, ladies and germs, let’s chat a bit about an esoteric area of the software industry today: Business Process Management. To those who came in late, BPM is a "combination of planning, budgeting, financial consolidation, rep-orting, strategy planning and scorecarding tools."

And to get an idea about what’s happening in the BPM space, I spoke to Suganthi Shivkumar, managing director for Asean/India at Hyperion Solutions, Inc., one of the biggest developers of BPM solutions. I started by asking Ms Shivkumar, one of two women managing directors at Hyperion, which posted revenues of $762 million in fiscal year 2006, about how BPM works, and where the technology is headed.

"At its most basic, BPM ensures that different divisions in an enterprise is on the same page when it comes to the business, and ensures that employees have a secure environment to compare notes. Obviously, it improves productivity, and a lot of enterprises in India are veering around to implementing BPM," Ms Shivkumar said.

According to Ms Shivkumar, Hyperion sees India as a key market, and is investing in people and other resources in the country. "We launched the Hyperion System 9 computer software last year, and the latest version of this will be launched next week," she said. Hyperion System 9, the company says, integrates a modular suite of financial management applications wi-th business intelligence (BI) capabilities for reporting and analysis. Companies like Hyperion appear to see rich pickings in India and across the Asia Pacific, going by reports by various technology consulting firms. The company currently has 50 clients in India. According to IDC, Indian SMEs are leading the IT spending growth in Asia-Pacific region, reflecting that technology is fast gaining priority in the country’s corporate sector. In a recent report, IDC has projected an annual growth rate of 16.9 per cent in the IT spending of Indian SMEs in 2007, which is the highest in Asia-Pacific, excluding Japan. The IDC report said that the APEJ market for BPM and BI was $340 million in 2005, a 22.5 per cent increase over the market size a year before. It expects the market to to grow 13.5 per cent to reach $639 million by 2010.

IP telephony

Meanwhile, the mass migration to IP-based services is finally happening in both the business and consumer markets, according to In-Stat. Even though the adoption of IP phones is currently lagging, the growth of IP phones will accelerate significantly beginning in 2008. "The migration to IP phones will coincide with the adoption of next-generation business and consumer applications such as presence-enabled calling features," it says.

The Gujarat University is all set to observe its Foundation Day today. Its the oldest and biggest in the state, established on November 23, 1949 with the pioneering efforts of Acharya Anand Shankar Dhruv and combined efforts of figures like Mahatma Gandhi, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, Kanhaiyalal Munshi and Kasturbhai Lalbhai.

To mark the day, the university will announce a slew of new courses and hold activities and cultural programmes to be attended by students, Syndicate, Senate members and the V-C. There will also be presentation on ‘Reason with Mission: Gujarat University in 2010.’

‘We will dedicate to the university some new self-financed courses,’’ said GU V-C Parmal Trivedi. Integrated M.Sc in Electronic and Telecommunication (E&T), Masters in Computer Science, Mass Communication among other courses will be announced at the event.

Source: Expressindia.com