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Vinod Mathew

AHMEDABAD, Dec. 20

THE top-of-the-line Indian graduate, after getting an engineering degree under his belt, has two options. Make a beeline for one of the top management schools in the country or better still, head out to destinations spanning the US or even some European countries. The latter would either push for a Masters in advanced engineering or fall back on the safe cushion of management studies.

Meanwhile, a good number of B-school students who graduate from Indian shores then enter the catch-up game by trying to land an overseas assignment. Needless to say, those who are already in the foreign land enjoy a definite edge as physical proximity both to the corporate and placement agencies earns them some extra points.

So, how do you explain the decision of at least two dozen Masters students from the US to cold shoulder job opportunities in the Big Apple and train their guns on Ahmedabad-based DecisionCraft Analytics Ltd, a start-up company specialising in a not so glamorous areas like mathematical modelling? One could shrug it away as a syndrome induced by the industry downturn in the US. But one could also take a close look at this company.

Vying with Mr Chirag Panjikar of Stanford University and Mr Sidhartha Sishoo of University of Alabama to join DecisionCraft in 2003 are at least three Masters students of Indian origin from the University of North Carolina, two from the University of Buffalo and many more from a clutch of other US universities. That it is not a one-off phenomenon is borne by Mr Vivek Ramabhadran, who finished his Masters from the University of Texas this year, after having graduated from IIT-Chennai.

"I joined DecisionCraft a few months ago as it was my wish to work with a product software company as it is in the service software sector that openings are mostly available. I came here not because I did not have any offers in the US, but because this was the kind of job that I really wanted to start out with. The biggest takeaway here is the daily learning," said Mr Ramabhadran who now works with similar-minded specialists like Mr Subir Batra (BITS-Pilani and IIM- Bangalore), Mr S. Kannan (IIT-Mumbai and IIM-Ahmedabad) and Mr Piyush Gupta (IIT-Mumbai) who between them had worked in i-2 Technologies, Deloitte Consultants, Satyam Computers and Oracle India.

Promoted by IIMA alumni, Mr Raviratan Arora, DecisionCraft has on board international heavyweights like Dr Pankaj Chandra, Dr P.R. Shukla and Dr J.C. Parikh who between them cover areas as diverse as supply chain management, high-end mathematical modelling and financial forecasting based on the fundamentals of nuclear physics. While Dr Chandra and Dr Shukla are full-time faculty at IIM-A, Dr Parikh is an honorary Professor at the Physical Research Laboratory. "Our attempt is to bring the academia and the managers, who otherwise hold each other in a healthy mutual contempt, together on the same platform. I have met more than 200 prospective employees in the last three months and many want to get out of their daily mundane work like writing source codes in big companies. We found that intelligence solutions was an area where being in India was not a handicap as we were up there with the global best such as Biogroup.com as we too have some of the best brains in the world working for us," said Mr Arora. Started in February 2000 and with the start-up money beginning to flow by way of Rs 3 crore from two offshore VCs a year later, DecisionCraft is set to close its first full fiscal come March 31 with an income of Rs 4 crore. The target next year is enhanced sales from products spun off as generic entities where `logistics planner' leads the list with Rs 20-lakh price tag.

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