Veblog

In an interview with Kamla Bhatt, Vegayan’s CEO Dr. Girish Saraph shares his experience on what it takes to run a start-up in India, and about the ever changing business plan, and if there is such a thing as “a good time” to start your business.

For detailed interview go to “The Kamla Bhatt Show”

This time the venue for our day-long excursion was none other than the exotic Exotica- a resort with a tropical ambiance at Yeor Hills (part of Sanjay Gandhi National Park) near Thane. It is a very nice place to relax and enjoy with family and friends. We reached Exotica around 10 am on Saturday. After a wholesome breakfast, we were charged up for a great day ahead. There was no stopping for us…volleyball, badminton, swimming. We also enjoyed a fun competition organized specially for couples. We could not resist taking a dip in the swimming pool and that too in this May summer. We had long swimming session along with a water polo game. The team was now ready for a great lunch. We all cherished the multi-cuisine lunch in the tropical settings of Exotica. After lunch, we chatted, explored the natural beauty around the resort, with few of us capturing pictures as a memory which we would cherish for a long time. Everyone enjoyed as a team. Finally it was time to leave and head back with a recharged mind and body!!!

Dr. Saraph from Vegayan coordinated the industry track at NCC 2008. It featured prominent invitees from telecom industry including stalwarts from Bharti Airtel, Reliance, Tata-VSNL, Tejas Networks, GTL…..

For more details go to Industry Track @ NCC 2008

Booth……

We had also setup a booth for Vegayan at the conference. This gave us an opportunity to showcase our company, product and vision. We had a wonderful opportunity to interact with some of the dignitaries from the industry, benefited from their insights and gained visibility.

Converged networks are the wave of the future—in fact, they’re being implemented right now! Multi-Protocol Label-Switching networks offer tremendous cost benefits, to both service providers and subscribers. Traffic engineering is a basic requirement for converged, next-generation networks, and Vegayan Systems’ work in this field is helping bring next-gen networks to us quicker.

For more details go to i.t. magazine (EFY Group) website

Download article : Vegayan Systems “Re-engineering The Network” by Nilesh Kakade

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.

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.

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

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.

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.