Back to globe-trotting

For a while, I'd been more or less spending time in Mumbai, then suddenly about 3 months back work led me to begin my globe-trotting again and give way to my wanderlust. It started with a quick stopover in Dubai for a proposal presentation, and then on to Brussels to join one of our consultants who was working there on a project. This Brussels project is quite noteworthy in terms of the ingenuity of our marketing guy who won it. Seeing a dearth of leads in his kitty, he started to search on Google for tenders and RFPs in our area of information security. He then found this one for an organization in Brussels. When he first told me about it, I said, give it a shot, but mostly we might not win it, because we'll have the disadvantage of increased costs due to travel and stay, which a local company or one in Benelux (Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg) or even Europe would be able to avoid by deploying local consultants. But he gave it his best shot, we got shortlisted, and based on a couple of telephonic discussions, they awarded us the project.

Brussels was quite an interesting experience. The project went off very smoothly largely due to the work of our consultant there, and then the weekend before leaving from there we decided to spend exploring that area. My better half joined us, and on her insistence we ended up at one of the casinos. And inspite of my resistance to the slot machines, we actually ended up winning 1000 euros! And then we won a couple hundred more on the roulette and blackjack tables. When we left, we were richer by 1200 euros, which we decided to blow up by hiring a car, going down to Amsterdam - a perennial party place - and spend Saturday night there. It was one helluva experience, and when they describe Amsterdam as one long college frat party - its a very accurate description! I haven't ever seen so many people - not even during peak hour on the Mumbai local trains. And definitely never the sight of thousands of people eating, drinking, making merry, and generally having a collective blast!

After Brussels it was back to Dubai, to sort out my residence visa, since now we have opened up our third office there. Got that done, then I was back to Mumbai for a week or so. My next trip started by having to rush to Mauritius to rescue a project because one of our senior consultants who also was heading our Bahrain office decided to part ways. So I had to take on the project mid-way. But again the place is so beautiful and quite the tourist destination. However, the work pressure was quite a bit, and we managed to spend just the one weekend looking around the place. From mauritius, it was back to Dubai to open up a bank account for the company, then on to Bahrain to sort out the legalities and paperwork and other stuff. Then another week in Abu Dhabi to do a training and complete a project we were doing for a financial institution there.

Then I was back to Mumbai for a couple of days before flying off to Taiwan for the OWASP Asia conference. The conference was wonderfully well-organized by Wayne Huang and his team, with over 1000 people attending. My presentation was on Business Web Application Testing - getting the larger business perspective to the technical approach of pen-testing. I had to rush immediately after my talk to the airport in order to catch my flight and be back to Mumbai in time for Diwali.

So yesterday we had Diwali Puja at our new office in Andheri. While we will retain our current office and convert it into a training center, we'll largely shift all operational and consulting activities to this new office, where we even have a cool new SOC - Security Operations Center, with capacity for 36 people working in 3 shifts.

Things are only going to keep getting more and more hectic. We are aiming to have our 4th international office up and running within the next 3-4 months, either in the Far East, or if that doesn't work out, maybe at a second location within India. Our team is also growing and brand recognition is getting better and better. So if the posts are more infrequenty you'll know why. I intend to write my next posts on our experience in setting up our 3rd office in the UAE.