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Asera among ten most likely to succeed

Ela Dutt
India Abroad Correspondent in Washington

Powered by the backing of giants like Vinod Khosla, general partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, Asera eBusiness Operating System is set to go places.

The firm, co-founded by chief technology officer Anil Nori, was recently named one of the ten private companies 'most likely to succeed', by a distinguished roundtable of investors at the fifth annual Technologic Partners Enterprise Outlook conference.

The roundtable, moderated by Technologic Partners principal Richard A Shaffer, looked at 95 companies presenting at the conference and selected the most promising companies in their respective categories.

Forbes.com also identified Asera in late June, as one of the top business-to-business companies for 2001.

Asera was awarded the distinction of being a key technology 'Enabler' alongside Oracle, SAP and IBM, a distinction bestowed largely because of its blue-chip customers, business strategy and technology solution.

And Network World ranked it among the ten companies to watch in 2001.

"Asera is the private company I am questioned about most often," said investor roundtable member Thomas P Berquist, who is managing director, Global Investment Research, at Goldman Sachs Group.

"Unlike other solutions that we are tracking, Asera is taking a fundamentally new technology out across the extended enterprise. You don't have to go out and line up multiple third-party vendors. If you already have a host of existing software applications deployed you can integrate those applications and derive more value from your existing data through Asera."

"Asera is somewhat of a big-bang idea," added Ian M Morton, a senior analyst with JP Morgan Chase H&Q's e-Business Software Group. "This company has a lot of buzz because they have some impressive customers and are the precursor to the Web services movement."

Some of its customers are Applications Gateway, BP, Cadence Design Systems Inc., Edwards Lifesciences LLC, Extreme Networks, LC Connect, Steel 24x7, Stinnes Interfer AG, and Wyse Technology, Inc.

Khosla, chairman of Asera's board, zeroed in on the start-up as a next-generation software company that was going to make the Internet more efficient for corporations and customers.

The 'real-time enterprise' area Asera leads in, is a technology that enables all company operations -- finances, marketing, sales, manufacturing, human resources, production forecasts -- to be conducted through the Internet in real time.

Asera's impressive board of directors includes Khosla, Ray Lane also of KPCB, Robert Carter, executive VP and CIO of Fedex, and Mathew Cowan, general partner at Bowman Capital.

Little wonder then that it has raised $175 million in venture capital so far.

Asera provides Global 2000 and emerging-growth companies with an eBusiness Operating System that includes a patent-pending software platform and applications development environment.

Based in Belmong, in Silicon Valley, Asera also has offices in the UK and Germany.

Founded in October 1998, the company has been noticed for attracting a top quality management team.

Nori himself was an Oracle architect for Oracle8 and Oracle8i, Oracle Object-Relational and Extensible Technologies, Internet, multi-media DBMS development, and XML technologies.

Investors in Asera include Intel, Nortel Networks, General Electric, Cisco, Sumitomo Group, Bowman Capital, and KPCB.

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