Bangalore: When the website `TechDivas' asked Radha Basu a few years ago what her favourite motto was, she replied: "God helps those who help themselves."

So it is hardly surprising that the latest and possibly one of the most compelling products to roll out from SupportSoft, the Redwood, California-based company she heads is a `Self Service Suite'. It is an

Internet-based software solution that allows customers to solve technical problems on their own — be it installing software on a mobile phone or fixing a television set-top box on the blink. Central to the service suite is an Automated Solutions Library of 65 automated plug `n' play tools, which are designed to resolve almost all foreseeable problems, with the touch of a keypad.

During a special briefing for The Hindu , Ms. Basu explained that the library, from concept to finished product, was the work of SupportSoft's Bangalore development centre. Private telecom provider Airtel has just launched a `NetXpert' self-help tool for its broadband customers, fuelled by the technology.

SupportSoft is one of the pioneering global players in the emerging niche known as real-time service management — helping to automatically resolve technical problems in the delivery of text, voice and video services.

"We can no longer hope to serve markets like India with localised versions of tools created for the U.S.," said Ms. Basu. "In fact, we are creating solutions for the emerging broadband market right here which we hope to ultimately deploy in the West." Ms. Basu has just relinquished executive control to become chairman of the company, where she will oversee its non-profit initiatives.

For the student of Chennai's Good Shepherd Convent and what as then, the Guindy Engineering College, it has been a 30-year stint at the cutting edge of global technology.

With a masters' degree in electrical engineering from the University of Southern California, she went on to head key departments at Hewlett Packard — and became the U.S.-based company's first employee in India in the mid 1980s when she set up HP's software operation. She soon headed all of HP's software centres worldwide. As Chief Executive of SupportSoft, after 20 years with HP, Ms. Basu was recognised as one of the senior-most Indian women at the head of major American technology companies. Now, she and her husband Dipak Basu have decided to devote half their time to socially meaningful work.

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