Storming the web!!!

In our recent post about SANIsoft Technologies, we have promised to get you the exclusive interview with Dr.Tarique Sani and here we go….

Storm: Sharing knowledge with your peers might be the only way to stay in business…..said by CEO Swati of SANisoft” How do you explain this to startups ???

Dr.Tarique: May be my CEO can explain it better {Swati Sani ,CEO, wife of Dr.Tariuqe Sani}

Okay, Ants! If you look at the natural history of Earth ants have survived the longest without much change. As everyone knows that ants are incredibly evolved as a co-operative.

Translating this for early stage startups would be a bit difficult because the “blaze of glory” syndrome attitude which inflicts most in the beginning. In my opinion, the key for service oriented startups is that market is large enough to accommodate several players so sharing knowledge is unlikely to harm your present clientèle and it is more likely that you will gain more than what you already know.

I am of the firm belief that whatever I am doing right now there are several people much smarter than me out there doing the same and at least some of them want to let me know that they are smarter and not necessarily in a “rubbing it in” manner.

Storm: Same extended to open source business model??

Dr.Tarique: This one is simpler to explain – Open Source exists because of sharing, sharing enables showcasing, showcasing gets you clients.

Storm: You cater to wide variety of clientele … is that with the same model??? Technology and business??

Dr.Tarique: Yes! All our current clients are those which either used or saw some open code written by us or were helped in some way by our code or posts to the forums or mailing list.

It is not that we do not market our services but by grace of open source we are not required to hard-sell ourselves in the conventional sense.

Storm: Indian Foss has a long way to go… how do u see the road map coming years.. With so many service industries taking away the talents mine??

Dr.Tarique: Indian FOSS has a long way to go but then it has come a long way as well. I don’t really have the capability of a FOSS soothsayer but going by the past trend I would say FOSS is here to stay and grow.

Service industries were always there and they will be there always – Here I would specifically like to say that to contribute to FOSS it is not at all necessary that you do it while you are at work and the excuse that there is hardly any time left after work is pretty lame as well.

Storm: CopperMine Photo gallery has caught enough fire!! Can u tell us your about CopperMine, how it started? Concept?

Dr.Tarique: With 3 million+ downloads I am sure everyone will agree with the fire part.

Though I am the lead developer on Coppermine I am not the creator. The earliest version of Coppermine was created by Gregory Demar who for various personal reasons abandoned it.

I personally got into developing Coppermine because it scratched an “itch” - I wanted a nice looking picture gallery which used MySQL instead of flatfiles for data storage. There were several features missing which I coded and gave it over to a then small community. A few more people and several more iterations of similar itches and here we are…

Storm: About your journey of SANIsoft so far?

Dr.Tarique: Tough, at times very tough but incredibly exciting. We have never had a dull day in past 9 years.

Storm: Coppermine announces the ” Google Summer Code 2007 ” why are you aiming student fraternity?

Dr.Tarique: Simple - Catch them young and they will be faithful forever, we need more faithful in the flock.

Storm: Finally, any message to wanna-be-entrepreneurs?

Dr.Tarique: Surviving is more important than monopolizing.

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Special thanks to Dr.Tarique Sani for giving his valuable time.

For rest all of you Techies, just stay tuned, we are going to bring you more of Xclusive series of interviews and talks.