eLitecore and me

Today, I stumble upon this news story is about eLitecore's expansion in middle-east. Ofcz thats a good news for eLitecore. They are a great company with the great bunch of products and great people.

eLitecore is a mid-size Software development house based in Ahmedabad, India. The company has a long and vibrant history. I know fairly good about them since I worked with them for couple of months and reading the news story took me back to good olds days at eLite. Couple of months, huh.. was it a consulting assignment? No. Actually I joined them on permanent rolls but just 2 months down the line, got an offer from Oracle India Ptv. Ltd. Since it was early days of my carrier and probably thought that working for a bigbrand would add lot of weight to my resume. And thats it, I quit. That was the end of my spree of working with startup. In 2003, I worked for Rightway Solution and eLitecore. And the learnings were one of the best, a rookie in IT field can get. In Dec,2003 I joined Oracle and since then have been with big corporates. So kindda have a flavour of both startup and biggies and how different its working with them. Ofcz it goes for another post. Probably in the comings weeks would write on this, since there are lot of things to share over here.

All that aside, lets come back to eLitecore. eLitecore has its genesis from IceNet one of the first ISPs in India during the early days of Internet in mid nineties. eLitecore started with developing network management and billingsoftware for Icenet and latter went to become a leading product development and services company. There are quite a few successful product based company in India (most of them are into services) and eLitecore is one of them. Part of eLitecore's business was services but product development has been their focus all along. Their primary product lines deals with network management, network security tools and billing software for small and large scale ISP. Their flagship product Cyberoam now branded as UTM has large install base in both domestic and international market. The product comes with tonnes of features like configuring Internet access policies, bandwidth sharing among the application, security features against attacks like Phising and Pharming, loads of reporting to get better insight in the Internet access patterns, VPN and the list goes on and on.


Coming to my stint at eLitecore, I would say those were one of the best days in my IT carrier. I got to learn lot of the insights about developing a product. eLite follows Agile methodologies for product development. The team size is usually small so there is lot of things on your plate to do. There were earnings on how to

• architect products
• creating the library and reusable code base
• how to leverage on open source
• how to make best use existing libraries out there
• integration
• designing data models
• Usability design of the systems
• developing a tool typically for network access management

Of course I didn't gain mastery in all the above. The learnings were not that intense for some of the above items, but I did get good starting point on the considerations for developing a software product.

Though after eLitecore, I never worked in network management tools, or Linux or even in Product development of late. All I am doing is technical consulting and implementation of BI and DW products. However the learnings from eLitecore are instrumental in my day to day working.