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AOL does IT from here

Anand Parthasarathy

Indian team helped to create Winamp player

— Photo: Anand Parthasarathy

Kevin Conroy, AOL executive vice-president (products), at the network’s operational nerve centre in Bangalore.

BANGALORE: In a cavernous, cool hall, banks of computer monitors provide the only light, their screens constantly changing as feeds from 20 countries cause text, pictures and dancing graphs to change.

Giant screens in the back monitor live new feeds as they go out to some 240 unique million Internet users worldwide who, every year, visit the 30 international portals of AOL.

This is the Bangalore-based Network Operating Centre of what used to be known as America On Line before it became part of the Time-Warner media group. It is the only such centre other than the one in Dulles, Virginia (U.S.) — and it shares the facility with the company’s largest development team.

Last week, AOL’s U.S.-based executive vice-president for products, Kevin Conroy, gave me a rare tour of the NOC, the operational heart of its entire Internet-based information sharing business. Even as we walked past screens logging visitors to every one of AOL’s news and information portals, email services, text and video search engines, a wire service update flashed the latest news: AOL’s offering Winamp had just been adjudged a fantastic freebie — a free Web tool — and the best in its class of media players by a global poll conducted by PC Magazine.

The Bangalore team of AOL handled the development, product management and many design aspects of Winamp, Mr Conroy said. Now it was working to create versions for the mobile phone of AOL’s Instant Messenger as well as the Truveo video search engine.

Clearly for AOL, Bangalore was a place where a lot of IT happened.

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