Neev Technologies

Just collating some of the questions that are asked to us by our potential clients.

ENGAGEMENT MODELS

Do you have or are willing to have the following engagement model

One where your team works at our development site? (ONSITE)

Yes

One where our team member works at your development site? (Your Office)

We are open to this but have never done this on a long term basis. Its usually been for a week or two max especially in the initial stages. This scenario has never arisen so far and we are surely open where there is a part overlap on both sides.

One where our team is on our site and your team on yours? (OFFSHORE)

Yes

DEV CENTRE LOCATIONS

Which cities are your development centres in?

We have only one development center in Bangalore, India

PRICING MODELS

Do you have or are willing to have the following pricing model:

Fixed Bid?

Yes

T & M?

Yes

FTE?

Yes. We are comfortable with all the three pricing models above. In out case, T&M and FTE work almost the same as we put a mutually agreed cap on the max hours per month that can be billed though the actual hours can be more as per the project demands.

Are you open to discussing the possibility of partnering with us to a certain extent where a percentage of the stake of our company is given to you in exchange for a reduced pricing?

Yes.

What are the additional taxes levied on billings on an Indian company?

Currently for any software provided & invoiced to a company to India, 10% service tax is applicable. This is liable to change based on government policy.

What are the additional taxes levied on billings on an US company?

None

How are payments to you, settled? Before contract start / Monthly / End of month / End of contract? (Please furnish as much detail as relevant)

For fixed bids, its milestone based. For FTE & T&M, its usually on a monthly basis.

TEAM MANAGEMENT

Which of the following elements of team selection and management can we exercise control over?

From candidates recommended by you, can we select our own team after looking at their CVs and after having personal and technical interviews?

We usually like to get into projects where we take the ownership of the delivery. Hence based on the project tech stack and focus we would suggest a team of optimal skill sets to you. We will share the CVs of the best team as suggested by us. However if the client insists on having more candidates to choose from and also are willing to accommodate an interaction with the client. i.e. we do not encourage a sort of recruitment kind of process from the clients side rather would like to make it a selection process with the initial level of screeing done by us.

From the team selected by us, can we let those go who are not performing up to our standards giving a 15-day notice to you? And in such an eventuality, would you be providing for replacement candidates within those 15 days?

We have stringent hiring standards (recruit laterally from the Top companies in India IT and also from the best institutes in India for freshers) and good post-recruitment trainings. We also do project based trainings as required. Hence most people are fully equipped to handle the project work. We have a continously running performance review process to identify these cases. Non-performers are put on PIP (performace improvement plan) and more often than not, they are back on track. In any case, your feedback on performance would be taken seriously and acted upon.

Do you have any clauses in your terms that disallow you from taking back team members from the ones selected by us, as long as we continue to pay for them?

We would be surely interested in continuing the same team. As a team we would ensure delivery and continued quality output which is the key part of a project.

Will we have access to other personnel on your team that have certain expertise relevant to us so that we can ask them for advice / guidance in their respective area of expertise?

Yes. Internally there is a great deal of knowledge sharing that happens amongst various functions/teams. Based on your requirement, we can definitely get people with other skill sets on the project as required. i.e. our whole pool of tech and managerial talent is available for our clients on a need basis

Do you have or are willing to have a model where the team members selected by us have the option of joining us full time at a later date?

We have not faced with this choice before. However we can always evaluate the same when the situation arises and are flexible to arrive at an agreement to the effect that it benefits all three parties i.e. our employee , our client and us.

TECHNICAL SKILL SET

What other additional technical skill sets besides the ones on our site do you offer to us?

Do you offer UI design for usability and studies with real target user forums and other allied services?

We have resources with a good UI/UE skill set but have never done usability studies with target groups. We have expereince in working with consultants (hired by our clients) who have taken the onus of defining and designing the study and then we have successfully impemented the technical end of the same. e.g.In one of the project that we were involved with, the client is working with another vendor who offered this competency and we were all closely working integrating the feedback.

Do you have experience in either designing or developing APIs for clients especially Web Service APIs?

Yes. A host of the applications developed by us have web services APIs exposed. E.g. for an auction portal in Germany we have designed , developed and deployed more than 100 + Apis for integration with iPhone Apps, After sales third party software, third party Lister tools. We have even done Web Services Apis for a ticket booking portal and a insurance company in India

Do you offer Performance Engineering services i.e. understanding performance requirements of system (like response time, etc.) under given conditions (like traffic, etc.), ensuring that such requirements are met reliably and that the system scales up to changing environmental conditions (like changing peak traffic, etc.)?

Perf engineering is under the QA team and we have engineers who measure the response time under various load conditions. We have done PSR testing & analysis in many of earlier projects either as a part of our deliverable or even as a separate activity as the product / application was developed by some one else.

Do you offer Quality assurance as a competency(setup and maintain infrastructure for testing and quality assurance) and also plan and execute unit, integration and system tests?

Test automation is one of our strengths and we do use Junit and Selenium. Attached is a presentation which explains the entire gamut of QA/QE services that we offer.

Do you help the client with hosting and maintenance of system infrastructure for production, test and live deployment?

Our Operations team offers deployment and maintenance support. We are currently monitoring and maintaining applications developed by us for some of our clients.We do not host but can suggest some reliable providers. Also we are very comfortable in getting the applications running on cloud infrastructures. (eg: ec2, go grid, joyent)

BUSINESS SKILL SET

What business skill sets do you offer to us?

Do you have services on offer to manage legal frameworks of markets, filing for Trade Marks and most importantly, for understanding and managing copyrights since this is a content driven product? - especially factoring elements of copyright management and security against plagiarism into the product?

We have a basic understanding of this but not a competency to offer as a service. We do have links to the appropriate people in our network in India (especially in Bangalore) and would be happy to introduce you to them.

Will you be able to offer services to help us with acquiring next stage funding when we are ready for the same?

We do interact with some VCs (mostly based out of India) and can put you in touch with them.

What other special services / infrastructure do you have on offer early stage startups like ours?

Over years we have worked with more than 20 startups(funded , Pre Funded, angel Funded etc) hence we have gained perspective over the push and pulls that a start up undergoes in terms of work priorities and deliverables , hence we have uniquely placed ourselves to be flexible with the same, you would find our whole engagement model tailored to the same. We use agile development there by adding a huge flexibility in release cycles, team size and also feature sets.