R&D: The core of Rocket Software

Anjali Arora
Senior Vice President, Chief Product Officer, Rocket Software.

Built with the core values like trust, love, empathy and humanity, Rocket Software started its journey in 1990 with solutions based on IBM ecosystem. It treats itself as an individual and has a very unconventional outlook towards business. The company primarily considers itself as an R&D organization and is currently aiming to expand in India for the talent pool.      
  

“The foremost thing is our culture and we are an engineering company. Our core values are Trust, Love, Empathy and Humanity. These are the core values of every Rocketeer. Rocket is like an individual and we expect Rocket to behave like a person and each of us to behave like a person and be a human being,” describes Anjali Arora, Senior Vice President, Chief Product Officer, Rocket Software.
   

Journey

Founded with an objective of turning ideas into products, Rocket Software considers that R&D is the main essence of the company. Majority of its employees are into R&D. It is the heart of the company.  

 
“Rocket started with two people in 1990 but today there are 1500 employees called as Rocketeers across the world. Rocket Software has been founded and led by engineers, so it is a R&D company. It is the DNA of the company. Rocket was founded to solve problems and to be able to turn ideas into products. Out of 1500 Rocketeers, 1000 are in R&D. Engineering is the core and heart of Rocket Software,” feels Anjali.

Adding further she says, “Rocket grew into the IBM ecosystem, it started with a product that Andy Youniss, President and CEO had an idea related to DB2 (database) and then IBM asked if they could licence the product and start selling it. This is how the IBM partnership started and it is for over 20 years. Now we focus on three platforms – IBM Z which is the big mainframe, IBM Power which is mid-range mainframe and multi-value which is our platform and that is a database and application server platform. Based on these three platforms we focus on data, application, storage and security. We provide solutions in these four spaces and there are also a lot of things like we invest in open source, all the modern technologies but over the last 28 years the company has just grown.

In the company we have products that run on IBM platform and we also have products which are offered on cloud and the product line is Trubiquity which is for automotive industry. We also have products in distributed side, cloud and products that help in storage from mainframe to cloud or secure the cloud. We have products in all the spaces but predominant portfolio in our company strategy revolves the IBM ecosystem. It is such from where most of our revenue comes from.” 

India Market

Rocket has a very different take regarding entering into different markets across the globe. The company venturing into India for its latent and not for the market. It first sets up its R&D center in any new country, observes the market and then decides about entering the market.  

“We are entering India not because of its market but for its talent. When we enter a country, we enter with R&D. We setup R&D Centers, build the teams and once we are established with it then we start learning the local market and customers, SIs, Partners and then we decide whether we want to enter the market. Rocket does everything very thoughtfully. Two third of the company is into R&D.

We provide horizontal products and most of our customers are in financial space which includes Banks, insurance companies, healthcare providers, transportation, automotive, retails etc. If you look at India, all the top companies in the world who are in this space have a center in India. They run their R&D, IT out of here. Most of our customers have center here in India. The only difference is they are still our customers in North America or Europe so the decisions are still made there for a lot companies, although they have big presence in India. We want is to understand working with them in both the countries, how they work, what decision they make here and what decisions can they make here. After that we want to figure out what exactly we want to do,” explains Anjali. 

Focus

The prime focus of the company at present is to establish Rocket Center of Excellence and expand it by increasing workforce. It is targeting to hire 300 people in India by 2019.   

“Since our focus is R&D, we want to first establish our R&D center, hire talent and our model is Rocket Center of Excellence where we are creating centers with full product development so all the decisions are owned here. As we establish it in next 18 months, we want to learn more about what our European and American customers are doing in India and what are their requirements. Then we will figure out our go to market strategy.

By end of 2019, we are targeting to be at strength of 300 people in India. In Pune we will creating our hub apart from Bangalore. We will hire 200 people in Pune. We have officially launched a center in Bangalore where there are 35 people. The Pune center will be launched later this year,” reveals Anjali. 

 
Aparna Mullick
aparna@varindia.com