"India is where technology is going to happen in the next 10 years."

-Terry Williams, Chairman and

CEO, Wilco International.

Wilco International is a securities

and trading software firm and a wholly-owned subsidiary of US-based $4.5 billion Automatic

Data Products, a popular independent computing services firm. The success of Gloss Range

Trading and Settlement systems based on emerging technologies such as Unix, Sybase and C

rose the company to prominence in the 1990's. Terry Williams, Wilco International's

Chairman & CEO and Sunil Shah, the Client Services Director, who were in the country

to formalize the takeover, spoke to DATAQUEST about the company's globalization

initiatives and their plans for the Indian center. Excerpt:

Why did you choose to acquire an

existing set-up that was deemed unviable by DE Shaw?

We choose this center for three

reasons. Firstly, there is a serious lack of quality resources in Europe and America.

Secondly, for the reputation of Indian technology. Thirdly, India has a very mature

democracy, not to mention people, a good educational system particularly in the IT

industry. Another obvious thing was the English speaking population. Then we happened to

have luck as DE Shaw approached us.

What synergies are you looking at

for the Indian center?

We have to think very differently

about India. The core development of our flagship product Gloss is to be undertaken here.

Apart from this, the center will also be involved in setting up NTT First - a settlement

link for Tokyo that entails liaison with Tokyo. In addition to these developments, we are

looking at other IT enabled services such as data management, from the Indian location. We

plan to put in $5 million investment in the first year alone.

Expansion plans are to build staff

strength of 300 people and then increase to 1000 in 18 months from now. I believe the

greatest limitation could be how we employ and assimilate the staff. India is where

technology is going to happen in the next 10 years.

With a host of software systems

in the financial markets, what in your opinion is the differentiating factor?

In our business we are virtually the

main supplier. We specialize in cross border transactions, market currency. The demand on

our systems over the last few years has far outstretched the supply. And that is why we

are looking at India in a much wider perspective than a mere solutions center.

What extent of customization do

you undertake?

We undertake customization for most

every client. For the likes of Merills, Goldman Sachs, that have big IT department of

their own and want to develop a lot of modules.

Do your systems cater to risk

management systems?

We are not so much into risk

management, but more with the procedures adopted between the trade and the bench, or

linking to the stock exchange. Some of the processes that we provide will only be part of

the trading and settlement, which are again part of the information needs of risk

management. Risk Management has been very difficult even for our clients and to get true

Risk Management Systems working in a dynamic manner around the globe is quite challenging

even for our big clients.

Why did you choose to reposition

your middleware system as enterprise solution?

The reason we did that was that our

product used to be called Gloss Hub and because of the name, large organizations tended to

use it only with our Gloss products, whereas it can be used for many other

functionalities. It provides connectivity to the Gloss system and also between other

third-party and proprietary systems. Some of our clients use Gloss with many other

interfaces. Hence, we renamed Gloss Hub as Enterprise Broker so its not too closely linked

to the Gloss name.

All systems today are being made

to cater to real-time processing. Do you think this is just a trend or there is a definite

urge to move to real-time processing?

I feel people need to think very

seriously, whether they do really need information data in real-time. Making it real time

is not necessary. In some instances, particularly financial markets, real-time is

necessary, but certainly in many cases it needs to be reviewed as it may not always be

necessary.

Does this mean that firms need to

constantly keep reinvesting in software systems to stay in the race?

The market is moving and if they

don't continue to invest, they will be left behind in their business.

Why are you concentrating on the

Japanese market in the current scenario?

Tokyo is going to be the biggest

demand market in the next year or two. The transaction volumes are still very high and

there is huge demand for outside solutions.

Any plans to sell in the Indian

markets?

We have no current plans to sell in

India. We may look at it if the number of transactions in the Indian stock market goes up

significantly. And I can't see that in the near future.

What are your future plans?

The strategy is to enhance the

current work on order management and to move much more into asset management. We are

basically looking at Java and XML for our Internet divisions, front end CORBA for core

customers. We are also keeping an eye on new emerging technologies like XML.