Cybage Software - Media Desk, News Releases

1. A culture of Recognition
Everyone wants to be noticed, everyone wants recognition and everyone wants to excel.

The question is how does one get noticed, recognized or excel? Is your company creating that opportunity for the employee to challenge oneself and to work in an environment that is conducive to “positive” change?

“Be the best in whatever you do” seems to be the mantra of today’s professional. Every experience, interaction and association with company should be enriching and help the employee with his growth. Secondly, recognition plays an important part in any professional’s life.

Recognition delayed is recognition denied!

2. A culture of Employee Motivation
Motivational Activities verily holds the key to prod employees to peak performances, and even challenge the boundaries that limit them. The need of the hour is thus to have a dedicated cell engaged in Employee Motivation activities. In today’s competitive world, it is only natural that companies spruce up their bonding activities lest the industry writes them off! Growth and Sustenance remains the mainstay in the battle-field.

3. A culture of Completeness / Work-Life Balance
As we are aware, the IT industry is characterized by long hours at work. The old Adage – “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” holds true to this day. Employers need to drive home the idea of adhering to a 9:30 am – 6:30 pm time-slot. At Cybage Software, the Manager is answerable for his team-members having to work beyond office hours – an indication that the Management goes an extra mile in preserving the Employee’s Work-Life Balance.

Often undermined, this factor if taken care of, would lead to significant reduction in Attrition. Encourage employees to look at life in totality and completeness. We have a family life, our hobbies and our social life or just time for ourselves to make it fulfilling and enriched.

Cybage gives it's employees reasons beyond "just work" that brings them to work each morning- An open culture, a democratic work environment, a place where members are exposed to good work, client interactions, challenging projects and new responsibilities at the early stages of their careers which lead to industry exposure and fast track growth, free hand at work which helps them experiment and apply their creative thoughts and ideas.

To further achieve the most appropriate “Work-Life” Balance, include “employee with family” in company events, shows, get-togethers, etc. It would also help towards instilling an “All-inclusive” culture and would create a “feel good” factor about the company.

4. A culture of Ownership and Accountability
Encourage employees to consider themselves as investors in the company “setting a context of mutual cooperation for mutual gain”. Employees would then view themselves as a natural extension of the Company leading to employee commitment and retention. Suggestion Boxes, Poll Questions and the like, wherein suggestions are elicited from employees that yields rich dividends!

Work from home. This will make him feel his company truly evaluates “work” and is also concerned about his family and is taking efforts to allow such policies to exist for the benefit of the employee.

Ensuring that punctuality in Entry and Exit hours is maintained and Efficiency Accountable during Work Hours (this has become a little long and is largely debatable).It is necessary to ensure a “work efficiency” check for appraisals and not a “work late” check.

5. A culture of “Open-door Policy”
Transparency and Corporate Accountability are the key practices for a company’s stability and growth. The Management needs to be approachable and receptive to the Employees’ ideas and incorporate them while formulating important policies concerning Employees’ Welfare. Companies should strive to embrace professionalism and an open culture of acceptance as both of them working hand in hand works wonders for organization.

6. A culture of Continuous Learning
-It’s extremely gratifying to know that more and more companies invest in Training of their employees. An organization needs to be committed to imparting training to its employees on a continuous basis – it is not merely an investment, it should be a way of life. A ‘culture of Learning’ is to be instilled within the organization.

-At Cybage, Management Development Programs in the form of formal and informal training is imparted to the Line Managers to function as an HR Person,:
How to handle grievances, problems that could crop up and how to deal with them, Educating on policies from time to time, team building activities and Initiating training requests and nominating their team members for the various trainings.

7. A culture of “keeping your ear to the ground”
Listen, Think and Act……

Does your company listen to its employees? Does it provide the opportunity for feedback?

"1 on 1" feedback sessions is extremely vital to know the pulse of the employees. At Cybage, the HR conducts feedback sessions religiously. Employees give feedback on their perceptions, their views and their suggestions on varied subjects from company policies to project management and processes, from infrastructure to ambience to policies and from work content to their growth potential. A concerted effort is made to retain the positives and strive harder on the improvement areas suggested.

"Meet my HRD Manager" counseling sessions:
There are days when we feel stretched beyond limit and want to talk about our problems and just get it "off our chest". It is here that the HR needs to step in and provide Counseling. At Cybage, an opportunity is provided to the Employees to block half-an-hour slots to talk to the HRD Manager, on professional and personal problems.

- Employee surveys and Open house sessions with the HR:
Conducting Employee surveys is extremely revealing and can yield good results. At Cybage, the HR speaks to employees team wise or group wise where the participants can have a forum to get their queries answered and clarify any doubts regarding anything and everything pertaining from company strategies to HR policies.

8. A culture of “Frank, Free and Fun place”
Professionalism not withstanding; a Frank, Free and Fun work culture needs to be encouraged. This philosophy can be communicated to the newly inducted employees during well defined and well executed Induction Programs.

Managers need to be focused, learn to strategize and be effective planners while dealing with their team members. Employees have their own agendas and we need to respect those especially which are out of office hours. Plan in advance. Once an employee knows the amount of work to be completed in a day, work organization will lead to better efficiency. It will promote branding by employees – after all who does what to have a good brand in the market?

So go ahead – create your own Work Culture!

In an industry where the first mover is supposed to have a significant advantage over others, Microsoft has always turned the table in medium to long term over first movers. Even non IT people by and large know the incredible history of Microsoft and how it changed the face of computers but probably what is even more incredible is to know how they evolved SQL Server, .NET and the latest entrant Zune. IT professionals with expertise in Microsoft technologies need not worry about their future at all; for such an IT professional to lose, Microsoft has to lose, which doesn’t seem likely even in the long-term. However, one always has to upgrade knowledge to remain in the thick of things.

It is very interesting to know how Microsoft offshores and engages with customers along with its licensing policies to spread its market-share. If we compare reasons for offshoring, the top two reasons would be cost advantages and shortage of man power or technical skills. Microsoft probably is a dream company for majority of IT professionals. Considering that, will they have a shortage of man power? It doesn’t seem so. It’s a resource rich company. Will it offshore just for saving dollars? Again, it doesn’t seem so. Even if Microsoft wants to save dollars, it has its own development centers in India and can ramp-up operations in these centers. However, when it offshores its work to a vendor such as Cybage, the unique advantage Microsoft gets is a potential customer for its tools and creates a virtual team of evangelists who sell Microsoft technologies to other customers.

Take an example of Cybage; our CEO, Arun Nathani founded Cybage in 1995, and we were Microsoft’s VC++ (MFC) shop for some time before we added other Microsoft technologies over next three years and later got into Java in early 1999. Java was the technology for most of the new implementation those days and Cybage Java group became the largest group in Cybage by 2000. Even after the dot com burst, Java was going strong and was the preferred choice until the advent of .NET in 2001. Microsoft .NET started eating up Java group’s share at Cybage, but the real thrust came when Cybage became a Microsoft Vendor in 2003 and subsequently a Microsoft Preferred Vendor, a status enjoyed by only a few select organizations across the world. A professional definitely cannot become obsolete following Microsoft technologies that will surely be there in future and at the forefront.

IBM is larger than Microsoft, SAP, Oracle & Sun and will be at the forefront due to its system integration expertise and large mainframe systems deployments. In fact, Microsoft, SAP & Oracle are purely software companies; by virtue of that and due to its large size, IBM is surely going to be leading the way in the future and it’s pretty safe for an IT professional to gain expertise in IBM products.

Oracle is an incredible story and it is there to stay. At the face of it, every application does need a good database to bank on and things cannot go wrong for the top two databases in the world. Oracle has been a leader on the database side. Although in recent times Microsoft is giving tough competition to Oracle, it is still early to speculate on Microsoft bypassing Oracle in the near future. As an IT professional, having expertise on Oracle is a kind of guarantee to land up with a good career. With Oracle 10g release in 2003 through to last year’s release of a free database engine XE and recent release of unstructured content database, it is clear that Oracle is not going to lose easily to Microsoft.

Founded on April fool’s day in 1972, SAP is a no fool company and currently the third largest independent software vendor in the world. Since its inception, it has done great business and if history is to be believed, it is going to be here in future. This is one of the few organizations whose curve has always been towards north. The cost of SAP implementation used to be one of the prohibitive factors. However, in the last couple of years, SAP has worked on releasing lighter versions of SAP that are available at far lesser cost; this is going to help SAP get an even bigger market share. The trick is to capture all businesses - large, medium and small - and SAP seems to be geared towards that. Professionals with expertise in technical implementation can bet on a good career here; challenge though is to get good training.

In the developer community, Sun is known more for Java than for its systems. Undoubtedly, .NET has impacted Java, but Java is still around and will be there in the future as well. This is because Java brought about a paradigm shift in the process of development and before .NET posed challenge to Java, hell of a lot of investment had already been done by companies across the globe. As a company, Sun has been struggling; apart from the emergence of .NET, the instability of Sun has also impacted the cause of Java. However, Sun has been trying to revive itself; nonetheless, even if we consider its efforts not coming through in the near future, by virtue of its current market share, Sun is going to be around in the future. Cybage is a software service company that specializes in Outsourced Product Development (OPD) and Offshore Development Center (ODC) - our business is closely linked with trends with technologies. And going by the trend, we can see that Java is going to be there along with .NET in the future.