They outgrew the space by January 2000. "We had to take people out for walks when we had to meet them," Keshav told India Abroad News Service. They converted a warehouse in Sunnyvale and raised $3.5 million mostly from Indian American entrepreneurs willing to bet on the team. They raised another $18 million soon after and ended a third round of an impressive $64 million this January 2001. Sharma, 28, and Keshav, 35, are graduates of IIT, Delhi, where Sharma was Keshav's student for a brief spell. A President's Gold Medallist from IIT, Delhi, Sharma interrupted his studies to found VxTreme, focused on client-server multimedia applications over the Internet.

The company was acquired by Microsoft in July 1997. He went to Cornell to finish his doctorate, but when he wanted to do a post-doctorate, the chairman said he was too brilliant to stay a student and in an unusual step, the university offered him an associate professorship. Keshav finished his doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1991, and returned to teach in India in 1993 on leave from Bell Labs. "I felt I owed IIT something and contemplated moving back," he said. But opportunity beckoned and he went back to Bell Labs, left with the breakup of AT&T in 1996, and taught for three years at Cornell where his paths crossed with Sharma's again. Today Ensim gets its best talents from Cornell and IIT, Delhi. And recently the company acquired CyberMedia India. Ensim now employs 140 people, 35 of them at the India office. "We deal with the day-to-day stuff needed to keep hosting services running. Companies will need fewer people and can do things more efficiently and more accurately," with Ensimsoftware, Keshav explained. "Our founding team was made up of three Indians, one Icelander and one Chinese. When we had about 30 people we put up a map which showed we covered practically every other continent."