The major elements of GDP are; identifying and laying down the business process, designing the platform agnostic solution, manufacturing the application, and testing and enabling the users to manage the entire solution-building process in a collaborative manner. It has been designed to enable people collaborating on the solution to be based anywhere in the world, and bringing together the best skills wherever they may be. “Today’s long-winded application development takes up to a year to deliver a solution and involves major expense and time commitment on the part of the customer and massive consultancy fees to go along with it,” said Dr Ganesh Natarajan, Deputy Chairman and Managing Director of Zensar. “GDP puts the power and control back into the hands of the customer and enables them to introduce their solutions to the market much more quickly, while also retaining the expert knowledge of their business within their company. This is a major leap forward in business process automation. “We chose the UK for the initial launch because we see major demand and potential here, in this fiercely competitive market,” he said. Zensar, which recently opened its new European headquarters in Slough, has already enjoyed considerable success in the UK. Zensar employs over 3,400 people globally with nearly 200 people based in the UK and Europe. It has a robust customer base, and has formed strong partnerships with Fujitsu, Sun Microsystems and Oracle. Its customers include Marks & Spencer, National Grid, Cisco Systems, and Electronic Arts. Zensar’s GDP is the realisation of a wider concept called Global-On-Demand (G.O.D), which enables collaboration of a company’s business and technology team seamlessly in a secure, monitored environment to achieve distributed design, project management using a common set of tools, techniques and process to define and deliver world-class solution from wherever they are in the world. This framework enables even business users to participate in the solution building process. “One of the problems of the business world has always been the need to ‘hand over’ the development process to highly technical people – usually external consultants – who go away and develop a solution” explained Dilip Ittyera, Chief Architect and Evangelist of the Zensar GDP initiative. “But GDP takes that need away because business people can easily understand and use this platform themselves to define their business processes, workflows and rules. Systems architects and designers globally can use those definitions to create the blueprint of the solution which is then validated, refined and transformed into applications ready for deployment. What we are talking about here is a truly disruptive development process. It is a paradigm shift from conventional outsourcing practices to collaborative global sourcing using the best-in-class capabilities”. GDP will be rolled out to academic institutions, software entrepreneurs and major clients worldwide in stages. As part of the UK GDP academic initiative, Zensar has teamed up with the School of Entrepreneurship and Business (SEB) at the University of Essex, where a Centre of Excellence, with 20 seats to start with, is being set up to utilize the GDP. A stream of students will learn to use the system as part of their studies and will take the knowledge with them out into the business world. The University of Essex program is the first in Europe, after Zensar’s successful programme with University of Sydney, Australia and colleges and universities in India. As part of the programme with SEB, Zensar will be sponsoring PhD research studentship on technology based entrepreneurship over a period of three years at the SEB, University of Essex. Professor Jay Mitra, Head of SEB at the University of Essex says, “This unique transnational initiative combining technology and entrepreneurship is at the heart of new ways of thinking around constellations of excellence building relationships and working together for sustainable economic growth through learning and doing. We hope this new venture will be a beacon for innovative forms of learning in both industry and academia.”
