Taking eWarna to next level in software process

by Cynthia Peterson, New Strait Time, Jan 2004

EWARNA recently appointed Shanmugavelu Subramaniam as its chief technology officer, who brings with him over 15 years of global software development experience.

Shanmugavelu was previously project manager for US-based Ocwen Finance Corp in which he was responsible for the development of the bank's asset management prod­ucts.

He has also managed his own software consulting firm in India, offering con­sultancy services on Java, software architecture and object-oriented technologies. Having worked in India with respected soft­ware giant Wipro and in the United States, Shan­mugavelu has a keen un­derstanding of software Processes and standards, and one of his main priorities is to bring in those experences to eWarna.

eWarna is the developer of online colour management solutions for colour-citical industries such as textiles, apparel, dyestuff and inks.

"I am a strong believer in the software process, and once you have a Strong process in place, results are predictable and quality is controlled," Shanmugavelu says.

Wipro, he adds, is the first software services organisation in the world to be assessed at Software Engineering Institute Capability Maturity Model (SEI-CMM) Level 5 (optimising), which is the highest maturity level for a software process.

eWarna is currently close to Level 3 (defined) where the software proc­ess is standardised for the organisation. Shanmu­gavelu targets the company to achieve Level 4 (managed) certification, where the company would have detailed measures of its software process and quality of products.

As such, he says the company requires more documentation work because many processes are still in the minds of the developers rather than on paper. To achieve Level 4 would take up to two years, hence he is looking at the end of next year to achieve that target.

TECHNOLOGY ROAOMAP

One of Shanmugavelu'S main responsibilities isto define the company's technology roadmap.   His experience has taught him that successful organisations look to the future, and eWarna is looking at Web services as the future. The company has formed a strategic alliance with IBM to jointly develop and market Color On-Demand, a real-time online colour management solution which utilises IBM's WebSphere middle­ware platform.

The company aims to be the first and only technology partner to provide colourimetric functions (colour functions and algo­rithms) as Web services components inside IBM's platform and products.

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions do not have built-in colour functions as colour is a specialised field. The collaborations enables eWarna to offer colour tools as built-in services.

Shanmugavelu says the colour tools enable colours to be measured and compared so that customers can be assured of the colours of the products. This is especially important if products are manufactured at different locations.

The tools, he adds, try to bring the measurements within specific colour tolerance levels.   eWarna claims that it is the first company in the world to create and deliver colour physics applications and other colour management tools on an Internet-based application service provider (ASP) model.

ADDING VALUE

The company is looking to expand to the plastics and automobile industries, and' efforts are already underway. Measurements in plastics differ from dyes because colour in textiles is measured through reflectants, whereas, light, is passed through plastics.

Shanmugavelu says eWarna is building value via its colour database.   Colour, he points out, is not an absolute value. For example, when a customer defines textile colour standards, the database can be checked to see if the colours are currently available. If no matches are found, the colour supply chain will use eWarna's colour solution tools to come up with a colour within the tolerance range, which is less than two per cent for trims (buttons, etc) and less for the main material.