Zensar Innovation Park

Zensar Innovation Park is an asset constructed by Zensar Technologies in Second life to have a presence in the virtual world.Dr Ganesh Natarajan, Dy Chairman and MD, Zensar Technologies Ltd and Chairman NASSCOM said, Our corporate experiments with business blogs and having a plot of land in SecondLife have shown the power to attract an audience through ‘pull’ marketing that the traditional forms of advertising and communication would never be able to achieve.

“The early form of commerce, which is advertising is now being replaced with more subtle opportunities to participate in value adding activities and games and companies who are setting up interesting properties in SecondLife and are seizing the opportunity to engage their audience in their leisure time hoping to translate that into real commercial transactions when the same brand is encountered in real life. This is how an educational institution could attract students to their classroom and internet learning experiences and organisations could provide campus experiences to entice potential job seekers.”

Kiran Karnik, former President of NASSCOM at his recent visit to Zensar launched the virtual estate of Zensar on SecondLife and said, “I really enjoyed my visit to Zensar on SecondLife and will keep my Avatar alive there and will visit the Zensar facilities from time to time. It has been a great effort by the team.”

PARRAS, the young student group from the Zensar Centre for Business Innovation said in unison, “Working on the project has been great learning and has given us hands on experience of working on live projects in a business environment. We have had the opportunity to work closely with the Zensar team and this has given us an exposure to mature processes and practices equipping us to be a part of the global team of professionals.”

Zensar has a diverse workforce and global customers from across 14 nationalities in 18 countries, and the Zensar Innovation Park on SecondLife forms an effective platform for the coming together of global teams. The platform serves a lot of our communication, training and learning needs. We also envisage business promotion and generation through the Zensar Innovation Park given the benefit of it enabling interactive and user friendly content – an area most websites have limitations with and fail to deliver. It gives us an opportunity to walk customers and prospects through our services, also rendering an experience of the culture at Zensar.

Features of the Zensar Innovation Park:

Recruitment

Zensar conducted its first virtual interview and focused group discussion on SecondLife giving a real life interactive feel to remote interviews. It also gives an experiential feel of the Zensar services, vision mission and values and all that the Company has to showcase on SL to new recruits.

Innovation

• A ‘Sandbox’ has been created for passers-by, for those who want to innovate in the Zensar Innovation Park. The Sandbox essentially gives the avatar a chance to experiment and build assets to learn the art of creation on SecondLife.
• The Company announced the formation of the SecondLife Club to form a Community of individuals who would be interested in creating an Avatar and building assets in the alter space of Zensar.

Induction

Being multi-locational, The Avatars go through an induction on SL giving them a walk through on the Company, of the various services and business lines of Zensar through a ‘Pod Visit’. There is also an in-built discovery phase through the ‘Did You Know’ boards strewn on the picturesque and green Online Campus, throwing Industry and Zensar trivia for new users.

Education and Learning

The Zensar Centre for Business Innovation (ZCBI) is the seat of learning and innovation at Zensar and finds its place in the Zensar Innovation Park – with facility to conduct conferences, online classes etc. ZCBI has three branches of Retail, Finance and IT and Operations, and each find a physical space on SL. Virtual classes are conducted on SecondLife, and recordings of classes are played back on screens for reference later. It is the first educational campus in India to be on SecondLife.

Low Carbon Zensar

Aligned with the Green Initiatives of the Company a Bio Park has been initiated online, which makes it possible for customers, remote employees and friends of Zensar to plant a tree on SecondLife, and the Company replicates the gesture by planting a tree in the real world on behalf of them.