Ravi S. Iyer: Worldly

Last updated on 22nd Dec. 2020 Minor update on 1st Sep. 2021 This is a somewhat informal and rather quickly written post, capturing some content of mine from a recent email exchange, in a slightly edited form, along with some additional info. I picked up while putting up this post. The reason I decided to put up this post is that when I searched for such information on the Internet I found rather limited info. So I felt it may be appropriate to put it up as an informal post which perhaps may be of some use to some researchers and writers on history of Indian software industry in the 1970s & 1980s, who land up on this post, say via Google Search. I think applications development work for foreign customers done in COBOL typically, in Datamatics for sure as I was employed there, and perhaps in TCS (Tata Consultancy Services), TBL/TUL (Tata Burroughs Ltd. which later became Tata Unisys Ltd.) and Patni Computers - the big guys in mid 1980s, was common in SEEPZ. TCS got connected to Burr...

Last updated on 14th Jan. 2021 Author: Ravi S. Iyer In his upcoming (to be published in near future) autobiography book, Jan Baan - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Baan , founder of Baan Company (also known as Baan Corporation) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baan_Corporation , writes that he visited India in 1987 with the goal being "to explore the possibility of setting up a software development team".  .. "The idea of expanding into India was novel, and risky at the time. In fact, we were the first company to set up a generic software development shop in India, before any other major software company began outsourcing to India." [14th Jan. 2021 note: The above paragraph of this post was updated with quotes from  latest version of  Jan Baan's autobiography. The previous version of this post had slightly different quotes from previous version of Jan Baan's autobiography.] It seems that by "generic software development" Jan Baan is referring to ...

Last updated on 18th December 2020 Article authors:  Ravi S. Iyer,  Ramanathan Subramanian and Darayus Bharucha 1. Baan Company, also known as Baan Corporation, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baan_Corporation , started outsourcing software product development to India operations in 1987  [Note-1] . This matches with the 1987 year Jan Baan, founder of Baan company, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Baan , has mentioned for this work, in his upcoming (to be published in near future) autobiography book, English language version.  2. Initially Baan company associated with the Indian software services company Datamatics Consultants Ltd., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datamatics , and started working with a team of Datamatics employees based in Datamatics SEEPZ office in Bombay/Mumbai. On ERP (Enterprise resource planning,  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_resource_planning ) software side, Ramanathan Subramanian and Shankar Mallapur from Datamatics went (on ...

Last updated on 10th Dec. 2020 This post follows up my earlier post: FDR's efforts in USA political arena to provide arms to democratic Britain & France in response to Hitler led Nazi Germany's military aggression in Europe in 1938 & 1939; Isolationists in USA who opposed FDR, https://ravisiyermisc.blogspot.com/2020/11/fdrs-efforts-in-usa-political-arena-to.html , 28th Nov. 2020. This post covers the period from beginning of the year 1940 till the US presidential election in Nov. 1940. Please note that this is a loooong post at least partly due to inclusion of large parts of two key FDR speeches in 1940.  Phoney War After fall of Poland in early October 1939, the Nazi German armed forces, and British and French armed forces (who had declared war on Germany), did not have any large scale attack on each other for eight months. This period is called Phoney War! From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoney_War : The Phoney War (French: Drôle de guerre; German: Sitzkrieg) was ...