From left to right: Aravind, Vijaykant, Senthil – Team Tationem
We have seen rapid growth and massive no. of entrants in the online education space, but very few are taking a step back and taking the process of training and skill enhancement offline. When it comes to learning advanced technologies, the online resources are always there, but they don’t prove helpful to many who want to get a detailed understanding of things.
Tationem started by Arvind, Vijaykant and Senthil is a group of Avanced Technology offline trainers who provide training in different categories such as Basics, Niche and Advanced.
The Basics:
- Java / J2EE
- NET Concepts and C#
- Oracle Databases / SQL
The Niche:
- Bioinformatics for Developers
- Biostatistics
- Apache OfBiz
- IBM Mainframes
- SAS
- PeopleSoft
The Advanced:
- Machine Learning for Developers and Analysts
- Machine Learning for Sales professionals
- Statistical Modeling for Developers and Analysts
- Algorithms for Developers
- Security and Compliance Monitoring for System Admins
- Essentials of Network Security for System Admins
- Operating System Hardening for System Admins
We’ll get into conversation with Vijaykant, the Founder and understand the mission and idea behind starting Tationem.
As we are seeing more and more individuals conceiving and taking lessons from resources online, why provide offline training? Does it prove more beneficial than the online resources? If yes, How?
There is a statistical evidence suggesting that online training are useful to those individuals, who already have some levels of understanding in that particular topic. To get introduced to topic, in person (offline) training bears better results. Another issue with online training is ‘someone talking at you’, and not ‘interacting with you’.
Online training also expects dedicated and mature audience, which essentially can cater to certain cultures. For the Indian set up, in person training works better.
What’s the mission or goal behind starting Tationem?
There are two main goals behind starting Tationem. In our experience, Indian IT industry is a hub for services sector. Not much product development or Software As A Service (SaaS) based work is being done here. The truth is, the talent in the services industry, given the right training and channel will be able to deliver great results in other hot sectors as well. We want to enable this transition.
The second one, which we expect to have more long lasting impact on the country’s IT industry is that we want to make students, especially the promising ones, aware of these niche skills and help them get a good platform to carry out projects, write research papers and make informed choices in their careers. Right now, there is no platform for students to get to learn about Machine Learning, Statistical Modeling, Data Mining or Advanced Algorithms.
Tell us something about your areas of expertise?
We are training, consulting and a research company. Although we provide training on a wide range of topic in Computer Science, we specialize in Machine Learning, Data Mining, Statistical Modeling, Algorithms, and Network Security. In consulting, we work on projects involving data modeling, data mining, machine learning and algorithm design. Our research arm is not-for-profit and encourages in-house as well as collaborative research. As we believe that in today’s world all fields can better exist only with aid from computer science, we carry out a lot of interdisciplinary research, research focused on applications of machine learning, data mining, et al. Basically, if you want to carry out data intensive research, we are the people.
Have you signed up deals with any corporations or organizations?
We have delivered tech-talks / training sessions at organization such as Tesco, Bitla Software, Honeywell, SanDisk to name a few. In terms of educational institutions, we are scheduled to conduct workshop for students of Sir M. Visvesvarya Institute of Technology, Bangalore and Mahaveer Institute of Science & Technology, Hyderabad. There are few more companies and colleges in pipeline.
Are there some fixed training charges or does it vary with the no. of trainees or the corporation?
The training charges vary from company to company, depending on the topic and the manner in which we are asked to cover. Our selling points are ‘customize it to what you want and not selling what we already have’ along with flexible pricing options. We leave it to the organizations to choose the pricing model of their choice.
We naturally charge a lot less to the educational institutions. We don’t expect to make profits from students. The whole idea in training college students is with the aim of having a bigger (positive) impact on the society.
Tell us something about the team behind Tationem.
Vijaykant Nadadur – Founder & CEO:
VJ as most people call him, holds a Master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Kentucky . His research interests include Machine Learning, Data Mining, Bioinformatics, Statistical Modeling and Algorithms. He also has worked on interdisciplinary research roles and has experience in teaching. Some of his research has been published in international conferences. Besides professional interests he spends time by blogging and is an avid reader.
Aravind Kamath – Co-Founder & Chief Technology Consultant:
AK as he is known amongst his peers, has expertise in Security and Compliance Monitoring and various Operating Systems. He has over 7 years experience in these areas and has been associated with organizations such as HP and Texas Instruments. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Sir MVIT, Bangalore and has several professional certifications.
Senthil Kumar – Co-Founder & Chief Business Development Officer:
Sandy as his friends call him, takes care of the business development and presales needs of the organization. In addition to that he takes keen interest in stock market and investments. He has been associated with organizations such as Dell and Sasken. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Sir MVIT, Bangalore and has several certifications in sales and business development.
What are your future plans for Tationem?
Like any other startup, we want to grow. We are currently a team of 18. We want to be a team of 30, by early next year. We are working towards bringing in more talented people on board, who share our vision of having a bigger impact on the society. We also bring in the practice of employing ‘under graduate research assistants’ (final year students), more in lines with the US universities, so that we can give these students are gist of real world problems, while they are still studying.
