Mr. Balasubramanian: Photon was founded in 1999 as a software solutions firm. I was personally involved in the founding of the company a long while ago but subsequently left to run another product company that my brother and I founded out of our Stanford dorm room. The company was Infravio, one of the leaders in the service oriented architecture governance space. I took over as CEO of Infravio back in the 2005 time frame and then sold the company to webMethods for $40 million in cash and went on to run Photon. Photon's unique value proposition is as a next generation Internet consulting firm building innovative e-business solutions. Think of us as the next generation of the Scients, Viants, MarchFirsts or Razorfishes. The matter of similarity is that they understood one technology stack, the first generation of the Internet, much better than anyone else. We believe that the new trends in software, like Web 2.0, service oriented architecture, mobile and Open Source, are very powerful and we sit at the confluence of all of these. We are a very high-end technology consulting firm that builds solutions around these platforms specifically.

TWST: Would you classify your space as selective outsourcing?
Mr. Balasubramanian: We have been called a lot of things. We have been called a second wave of outsourcing or selective outsourcing. So a little bit of history of the outsourcing business is that the rank and file outsourcing business — "I want 20 bodies at a cheap rate" — has been fought and won. The winners are companies like an Infosys or a Tata Consultancy Service. When a new firm like ours comes in, we have to show additional value on top of that to the customers who already have existing incumbent vendors. So we come in with very specialized knowledge of brand new technologies like Web 2.0, service oriented architecture, mobile and Open Source, what we call the second generation Internet. Our specialized knowledge provides unique value for the customer in order for them to give a much smaller company like ours a chance.
http://archive.twst.com/notes/articles/akb613.html?netscape