EQ Technologic

The development of the US Defense Department's Generation Next supersonic
fighter aircraft F-35 is being monitored from Pune. No, this isn't a scene
from a science fiction novel of the Arthur C. Clarke kind. For, sitting
thousands of miles away from the Lockheed Martin plant in the US, Pune-based eQ
Technologic engineers are monitoring the progress of the F-35's development by
collating data and analyzing it on the web using software called eQube.

But aren't Indian software companies good only at producing hordes of code
warriors? If this is what you think, it's time to look anew at eQ. The company
is involved not only with the F-35s, but it is also holding talks with NASA for
the Mars mission. It also deployed eQube at the Samsung digital consumer
electronics division in the US and is in the process of doing so at Motorola
where it would be connecting the supply chain management with the team center.
No wonder then that eQ Technologic's US-based CEO Dinesh Khaladkar sounds not
only upbeat but positively cocky as he proudly says, "our eQube deployment
in seven weeks at Lockheed was the fastest ever rollout of any software in their
case."

Khaladkar tells us that eQube was developed post 9/11, when US companies lost
huge volumes of data across applications. Currently, eQube has 12 customers, all
based in the US. The company works in close association with UGS' Team Center
program, which in fact opened the door to the Lockheed deal. Headquartered in
Philadelphia, eQ has also invested in two other products that were developed in
the Pune center. Of these, Mobieq is a GPS/GSM based vehicle tracking system,
which uses RFID technology for realtime tracking. This software has been
licensed to Dutch company Groeneveld, and has customers like Northrop Grumman
and Pune-based Prasanna Cargo. The other product was BeeNotes, a Lotus Notes
mail on the Web, which however the company failed to deploy commercially.
"However, BeeNotes was the largest downloaded application in download.com
for two weeks running," reminds Khaladkar.