India’s IT sector is projected to gross $87 billion in 2008, according to Nascom, a global trade association for the software industry. The industry’s growth is the result of the country’s booming economy and the emphasis on mathematics and science in its schools. It is closely tied to U.S. demand: India exports about 61 percent of its total IT products and services to the United States and Canada.
For New Boundary, the partnership means a wider reach for two of its products: Prism Suite, a set of software applications used by corporate IT departments to manage computer systems over a network; and Policy Commander, a program that automates the enforcement of computer security policies.
Developing the partnership took about seven months overall, and included multiple trips, phone calls, and teleconferences. During the initial meeting, both Taarak and New Boundary focused on doing due diligence and establishing expectations.
“What we were doing is . . . trying to understand how each of us could potentially benefit from the relationship and whether it made sense to go a little deeper,” Diamond says. A trip in February allowed New Boundary’s vice president of sales and its international technology account manager to visit Taarak’s facilities in New Delhi, Bangalore, and Mumbai to get to know how Taarak’s operations worked. Another visit in April was more pointed, with the two companies working out the details for the partnership agreement, which was signed in May.
To get to know how Taraak did business, New Boundary employees went on a site visit to a Taraak customer. New Boundary spent several days training Taraak people how to use, manage, and market its software.
“[Taarak] attended our international distributor conference in Malta where we get all our distributors together, and that’s where we really finalized the agreement and made the decision from both ends to move forward,” Diamond says. Besides Taarak, New Boundary currently has 19 international partners and 12 distributors in the United States.
Moving Forward
After formally drawing up an agreement, Diamond says things moved along in a fairly routine manner.
“With most contracts and agreements, you have a little bit of give and take from both parties,” he says. “But I wouldn’t say there was anything unusual or especially difficult as we worked through things with Taarak and India.”
Taarak employees were very appreciative that New Boundary sent people to India for several meetings—rather than having Taarak employees come to the United States, which would have been the more typical arrangement. It demonstrated to Taarak that New Boundary was willing to go the extra mile to build the relationship.
“It really takes understanding . . . to make sure that both companies are aligned in terms of what the individual business objectives are, what the missions of the organizations are, and where they’re really trying to go,” Diamond says of the partnership’s development. “[It’s] really making sure that, philosophically, the organizations are aligned in trying to accomplish the same things.”
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Minneapolis has a new sister: Cuernavaca, the capital of the state of Morelos in Mexico. A committee of people from each city will work to stimulate economic, educational, and environmental connections as part of the Sister Cities International program, which was started by President Dwight Eisenhower to promote citizen diplomacy. Minneapolis’s Latino population increased by about 270 percent between 1990 and 2000, and of those that identify themselves as being Mexican, many have connections to Morelos.
In October, a new job skills exchange program led by Hennepin Technical College with support from the Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED) and other partners will join forces with the National Tooling Initiative in South Africa to create a fast-track metalworking training program for low-income people there. The goal of the initiative is to recruit, train, and employ workers in metalstamping, sheet metal fabrication, welding, machining, and CNC operation. In helping South Africa develop its manufacturing economy Minnesota DEED hopes to build a trade partner, says Kristen Morrell, DEED’s communications director.
—Katie Harholdt
