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Celstream

Celstream originates from the Latin 'celer' (speed). Amrita Ghosh of IT@TT met Kunal Kashyap, Founder and Executive Director, Celstream Technologies. Read excerpts about Celstream's efforts to sail into the future.

IT@TT: How are you enabling innovative interaction in the New Economy?

KK: The Internet driven New Economy is causing a paradigm shift in the way people live and communicate and in the way organizations interact and transact business with suppliers and customers. For instance, some of the work that Celstream is doing would enable users to access any content, anytime, anywhere. Celstream Technologies' vision is to enable innovative interaction in the New Economy. Between people, organizations and content by engineering and developing products that enable our customers to create, store, manage and deliver content and users to experience content.

IT@TT: How does Celstream propose to use technology to revolutionize methods of creating, delivering and experiencing content?

KK: Celstream Technologies excels in product engineering, and uses various technologies to revolutionize methods of creating, delivering and experiencing content. I would like to illustrate this with some examples.

One of our customers is the Grass Valley Group, a premier supplier of video equipment addressing the broadcast and Internet markets. We engineer and develop products for the Group that address disk-based, non-linear video storage needs. This enables new content to be created and stored in digital form and existing content to be re-purposed and stored in digital form. Another good example is our product engineering effort for ContentGuard, a pioneer in digital rights management. Our work enables them to deliver products that protect the rights of publishers, who put out their content on the Internet.

We are now leveraging our strong product engineering capability to design and develop our own software products that will address the digital media asset management needs of customers in the Fortune 1000, Broadcast, Advertising and Internet markets. Our products will enable owners of digital assets to "connect dormant assets with paying customers." This will allow producers and aggregators of digital content to harvest new revenue from existing assets. Celstream Technologies will accomplish this by developing a "plug-in" media interaction framework into which can be connected core functionalities depending on customer requirement. We also plan to partner with other vendors to supplement our offering with key functionality that we're not going to create ourselves.

With that objective, we have established our own operations with a team of 25 people, which will focus on product engineering and product marketing in India and the US.

IT@TT: What is your focus area of work and competency in the field of Convergence Technologies? Are you targeting any specific segments?

KK: Celstream Technologies' product engineering work addresses the New Media and Telecom industries that are involved in the Convergence phenomenon. Within these markets, we have special focus on some domains such as Asset & Media Management, Rights Management, Wireless & Mobile, Network Management, Switching & Routing, Embedded Systems, etc.

IT@TT: What is your business model?

KK: Celstream Technologies differentiates itself from most Indian software companies, by planning to achieve long-term growth through the development of its own software products. Today we have three distinct businesses, targeting the new media and next-generation communications markets. Our Product Development Services business provides long-term, offshore, dedicated development facilities for customers. Our Project Services business provides project-specific consulting and applications development services.

IT@TT: Does Celstream have stockholders and stake holders in their scheme of things?

KK: Celstream Technologies is co-founded by Terence Gooding, Brijesh Wahi and me, with strategic equity investments from the Grass Valley Group Inc, USA and Tektronix, Inc., USA. ICICI Venture is our venture capitalist, with a US$6 million in Celstream Technologies. Besides, all our employees hold stock options in the company.

IT@TT: In this age where speed is the name of the game, what are Celstream's future plans of living up to its name?

KK: In our focussed markets, the rapid pace of change necessitates quick response from companies focused on product engineering. We believe that Celstream Technologies is pioneering the way by spotting trends and needs and responding quickly with product engineering efforts, whether it is for our customers or for ourselves.

IT@TT: Do you get time to surf the Net? If yes, can you please share with our readers some of your favorite websites?

KK: I do surf the Net. Some of my favorite sites are www.cnn.com, www.economictimes.com, www.india-today.com, www.totalcricket.com.

Interviewed By Amrita Ghosh
[email protected]

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