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Tachyon Technologies: rooted to the soil

Shobha Warrier in Madras

Ram Prakash, Sreeram K S, and Vamsi Mohan -- three young, bright sparks from IIT, Madras -- decided to chase their dream in India rather than give in to the temptation of going abroad. That, in a nutshell, is genesis of Tachyon Technologies.

"Most IIT-ians go abroad in search of greener pastures. More often than not this is more due to peer pressure than any real understanding of the realities there. I am not very comfortable with the concept of leaving my country. We found no compelling reason to go to the US and decided to do something of our own here," says Ram Prakash, a graduate in computer science.

"We had only one goal: to float our own company in India. I tried to convince many others to stay back, but only 12 of us stayed back to bring our dream to fruition," he adds.

The first break came when Ram Prakash, his classmate Sreeram and Vamsi Mohan, an electrical engineering student of the same institution got an offer from an infotech company to join them as programmers when they were in their final year of studies.

"We were the first employees of that company and working for them for one year gave us adequate experience and courage to start our own firm the moment we completed our studies in 2000."

With about Rs 300,000 and three computers, Tachyon Technologies was launched in a rented apartment.

They chose the Greek word Tachyon, which means 'swift'. Tachyon (postulated first by George Chandy Sudarshan in the 60s) is a particle that travels faster than light. The average age of Tachyon Technologies staff, which now has 22 members, is just 22!

Justifying their confidence and ability in themselves, they got Satyam Infoway as their first major client. In a few months, they are flying higher with more offers and interesting work.

"We are developing Java-based Web technology. But we are different in the sense that we develop our proprietary tools which will make the development process itself quicker," Ram Prakash explains.

One of the major products developed by Tachyon is 'Typhoon', a cutting edge content engine that enables users to deliver projects faster.

Typhoon is a plug-in to any Java servlet platform such as Apache, JServ, IIS or Tomcat.

The objective of their in-house design and development effort was to enable reuse of code with templates and a generic framework. Given client specifications, they can sort out customisation rules from the generic functionality of the content engine. When these customisation rules are fed to Typhoon, it automatically generates a working module.

Tachyon says that Typhoon is like a customised Web-programming framework that minimises or removes repetitive code that uploads, accesses and displays data. As they use XML and XSL technologies, they could create a module that "allows easy modifications in content structure and can be layered with any look and feel".

The three young entrepreneurs claim that because of the technology that they have developed, they could do Web applications 3 to 5 times faster than the standard process.

Another product of Tachyon, which is different from the other products that are in the market, is the e-conferencing engine.

"The important thing is that this is not a desktop application but a Web-based one. We have a workflow for the corporate to organize conferences on the Web and pick up people and invite them for the conference. All the invitations and notifications go by mail to the invitees," says Prakash.

"The value addition that we are giving other than voice chat, transliteration and instant messaging is the white board. With the picture that is uploaded and the help of the drawing tools that we have, discussion between the organiser and the participants becomes easier. Power Point presentation also can be done in the conference, and mind you, all this can be done on the Web and not on the desktop," he adds.

Though only eight-months-old, the question they are frequently asked is how big do they want to be in future.

Pat comes the answer: "Perhaps, as big as Infosys or Wipro. But that does not mean that we want to follow in their footsteps. We want to make a mark, and that is our main aim."

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