You began a career in trading commodities. So when and how did you foray into the software industry? 

Yes, I am not a techie. I used to trade commodities enjoying import and export for a firm in Mumbai. But during this time, I saw a need for software for commodity trading. So, I spent more almost 24 months meeting with customers as a trader, trying to understand how to fill the gap and how systems would be a boon to traders like me. Since I have no background in software, I researched for a year on the requirements of the commodity trading industry, how it works, how to install a system for a particular pain point.  I moved to Bangalore, and set up shop, hired people and started out, spending almost 50% of my time meeting and talking to people on the benefits they would get from the software. This was how I educated myself about software.

So you are saying that your entrepreneurial spirit was lit by your ability to identify an opportunity.  While there are opportunities everywhere, the main point is you  need to  have the guts to take a risk, and the research to back it to believe that  the opportunity can be translated into business success. 

Obviously, in my experience this is exactly what happened — careful research combined with my intuition that this opportunity will be a success.  Many times too much research is done with no action. I do not believe in market reports. I believe that research and  study done by yourself and through interaction with customers and feel of the market is what will make your product a success.   

How do you identify customers and ensure that they will give you the right picture while your product is being built?   

Since I was in touch with customers for 24 months before starting the business, it was easy to contact them.   It is important to know how to convey the right message to your customers, tell them about the kind of solutions you are proposing.  Moreover, if you are connected on LinkedIn through your professional contacts and friends, you can easily connect with customers. 

I don’t think it’s a big a challenge to identify customers. I think the biggest challenge is the right approach. I recall when I contacted people whom I have known for at least five years, be it in Hamburg or Amsterdam, we were able to relate because they felt that I understood their pain points and were confident that I would bring to the table valuable solutions.

So your next step was to build the team.  So how did you form the right team, especially the founding team? 

You must be passionate about your product because then you can speak with conviction about the advantages of your product. 

When I started, I used the personal contacts route. At that time, I did not know anybody in the IT sales or products fields.  All that I was confident about was that Bangalore is a good place to do business in the IT field.  I met people, worked with them for some time, and they helped me understand how the whole industry works. 

For product development, I also reached for professional assistance to some of the larger technology MNCs who had more experienced talent. Since I did not have a software background, I decided to concentrate on sales from inception. 

For any start-up I think it is very important to decide from an early stage as to what is the main driver in the business. If you are doing business applications then sales is key driver, if you are doing online sales then marketing will be the key driver and if you are making tech based products then technology is the key driver here. But if it is very important to identify the key driver that will then help decide the skill set of the team. 

Today, what would you say are the key things that differentiate EKA in the market? 

For many years, people have been trading in rice, sugar, wheat and metals. It is important to have a good supply chain to manage this trading.  And for this you need excellent software that simplifies the supply chain. This was the challenge as a trader I was trying to overcome.  We basically cover that need in EKA today.  

A lot of our competition, mainly in the US, is focused on crude oil, gas, trading industry. We were the first one to focus on the commodities industry and therefore had an edge in the market.  We carved a niche for ourselves. 

Please share with newer entrepreneurs the learning’s that you have had over last five years, especially  amidst the challenges you and other emerging companies in India face?

The biggest challenge is putting together the right sales team. The product might be good, but it is the taking of it to the market that will bear fruit.  You also need an efficient global online distribution model. Another serious issue is how to retain employees. How do you convince people that your product is here to stay for a long time and not just a couple of years.  Emerging companies need to convince employees that their products are not fly by night, but bring value to customers and, thereby, employees over a longer span of time.

Avi from iSPIRT put together a delightful, half-day session that brought together a smattering of product people from Delhi-NCR region.  In addition to product managers, CEOs, and senior executives from a wide range of Delhi startups, the icing on the cake was the presence of a hard-hitting product team from Intuit that had travelled all the way from Bangalore to share their experiences with the assembled audience. The Intuit Team included Deepa Bachu (Director, Emerging Market Innovation at Intuit), Samarjit Ghosh, Lalitha Ramani, Vivek Vijayan & ThiyagaRajan ) 

Everyone can build awesome products – Deep Basu from @intuit #india #productleadership workshop #pnmeetup twitter.com/Product_Nation…

— ProductNation.in (@Product_Nation) April 20, 2013

The Intuit posse had experiences working on a variety of products from the uber-popular Turbo Tax to the socially relevant Fasal and an engaging discussion on their diverse experiences exposed the audience to a wide range of challenges that the Intuit teams faced and the teams’ approach to overcome these challenges.  Many an aspiring entrepreneur has been flummoxed with multiple questions vis-à-vis product development, not limited to prioritizing features, costs, and release cycles and the Intuit team cleared a lot of misconceptions around commonly accepted best-process with their highly structured product management approach.  Intuit’s product management model is largely based around the hypotheses driven approach that, in addition to software development, is the bedrock for business decision-making from optimizing scientific discoveries to underpinning most strategy consulting engagements.  We were walked through a detailed explanation of the Intuit way and were then led to put our newfound knowledge to task with an actual exercise on the streets.

The hour spent on the streets by 25 eager entrepreneurs, braving the Noida summer-heat led to the thread baring of multiple, seemingly unambiguous truths about how we thought about product research, design, and development.  The interesting aspect of the exercise was that that like many frameworks, the Intuit approach brought out its share of naysayers and skeptics among the assembled audience but the healthy discussion that followed enabled multiple perspectives to heard and discussed. 

Productive day, learnt about building #products thru experiment. tks to @deepabachu @mtrajan #pnmeetup #prodmgmt twitter.com/avinashraghava…

— Avinash Raghava (@avinashraghava) April 20, 2013

As a startup-CEO at Studycopter, managing the product development process is an integral part of what I do, day in and day out.  Sharing of notes and perspectives with fellow CEOs and product managers was a unique opportunity for me to test my assumptions and build a new way of looking at problems and coming up with solutions. 

I can write with a reasonable degree of certainty that all participants would share my thoughts about the utility of the aforementioned session and moving forward, I look forward to the Studycopter team and I participating in multiple such meetups to build the intellectual rigor that would be critical in delivering breakthrough product experiences for our customers.

Guest Post by Adi Jain, Founder and Chief Awesomeness Officer at Studycopter, a mobile + online learning platform to enable students to get their best possible scores in competitive exams such as the GMAT and GRE.  

What is your Story? What inspired you to be an entrepreneur? 

I wanted to  create a Global Enterprise Software Products company from India that would challenge the market biggies and create a brand for Indian Products in the Enterprise Software Domain which is today largely  dominated by MNC products. 

Why and how did you start your company? Why this Area? 

The dream of developing Enterprise Software Products from India was the primary reason for starting ProGen. A True “Made in India” product that can deliver “Value for Money” to customers motivated us to take this road less travelled by Indian IT companies. 

The company was started as a garage set-up in Hyderabad with initial seed capital secured from like-minded individuals/friends who believed in the strength that India possesses in developing global software products. The initial team size in 2009 was 5 members, which has now grown to 25 plus. 

We selected the area of Business Intelligence (BI) & Analytics because of (i) a growing market demand (ii) Gaps in existing offerings with an opportunity to innovate both in terms of functionality as well as delivery (iii) Product Development expertise in the BI Domain.

Delivering superior value proposition through our simplified yet powerful BI Platform ‘pi’ has helped ProGen create a niche for itself. This is evident from the fact that within a short span of 1 year, customers across 4 countries trust our BI Platform for their daily & strategic decision making needs. Our customers include market leaders in their respective segments across diverse industry verticals such as: Airports, Travel, Pharma, FMCG, Retail, Distribution etc.

What is your product’s differentiator from the competitors? 

Our biggest differentiator when compared with established MNC offerings available in the market is our Product Design Approach. Unlike MNC vendors who conventionally follow a technology oriented design approach, we focus on a customer centric design approach that incorporates an Agile Product Development Philosophy. 

The approach has yielded tangible results in form of a simplified yet powerful BI Platform, which is as efficient and feature-rich as any of the contemporary product offerings from the established MNC players and is available at a cost much lower than other products. 

What is the biggest challenge ProGen has faced so far? 

Selling a “Made-in-India” Enterprise Platform to customers in India. 

Like any start-up company it was a challenge for us as well to sign the first few customers and being an Enterprise Product Start-up accentuated the problem further. It was extremely difficult for us to convince our customers about buying a business software package from a start-up that would eventually become the part of their organizations DNA in strategic and operational decision-making. There were multiple scenarios where business users at customer organizations had a buy-in on the value proposition from the Product but the IT Department was not willing to take the risk by engaging with a virgin product and it was frustrating for us to lose deals after months of sales efforts.

Rather the interesting point to note here is that the IT Teams in the prospect organizations still ask us ‘which Global Company’s BI software are you representing’. This reflects the acceptance level of Indian Enterprise Software Products among Indian customers and is indeed the biggest challenge that we face ALWAYS 

How did you address the challenge? 

The challenge was addressed through our Channel Partner Strategy.

Signing up channel partners for a new product in the Enterprise Application domain turned out to be as challenging and difficult as acquiring new customers but the mileage that a good partner brings to the table goes a long way in building the business. 

Similar to customers, channel partners also look for engaging mostly with established product brands or for companies from outside India. 

Channel Partner strategy requires lots of hard work in identifying and working with those partners who are open to align with new product companies and see the product as an opportunity to add value to the customer ecosystem. Our initial few partners sensed this opportunity and took the initiative of introducing our BI offering to their customers or to the prospects they had. 

Who is your customer? 

In today’s world, data is growing at a rapid pace across all types of organizations irrespective of their size and industry vertical. BI as an application is a need of the hour across customers and verticals. Being a company in the platform business our customers are not restricted to a specific vertical or size and they are scattered across verticals such as: Airports, Travel, FMCG, Retail, Contact Center, and Pharmaceuticals. 

Our target customers can be basically classified as “Value-Conscious” organizations that are not “Brand-Conscious” and are looking towards a Product that is a combination of “Rich Features” and “Value for Money” 

What’s been your success mantra in expanding to emerging markets?

1)     Keep your Product Simple

2)     Clearly Communicate the Value Proposition

3)     Trust your Channel Partners 

What are your future plans? 

In the next Financial Year (2013-14) we target to increase our customer base in India with a growth focus on Middle East and Australian/APAC markets and augment our BI Platform with new product features/modules that are currently under different stages of testing and development. 

In the Medium term we plan to expand to other global markets and release our BIG DATA Analytics engine integrated with our BI Platform. 

Plans of providing a SaaS/PaaS based cloud offering in the BI Domain to customers in the Matured Markets of USA, UK, and other parts of the World is also in the pipeline and official release on the same will be announced in the coming months. 

What have been your BIG lessons – personal, professional and otherwise? 

Running an Enterprise Products Business in India is a mix of “Loads of Patience without losing Focus on R&D” coupled with right amount of aggression and perseverance. 

Overnight success in Enterprise Products domain is unheard of and one should be prepared enough to face the challenges presented by different phases with each phase demanding different approach and strategy.

What would you like to tell someone, who is struggling or planning to start a product company?

• Get the right team in place and plan for a strong resourcing strategy
• Stay Focused on your R&D Mission
• Don’t get lured by the early revenue opportunities from services that may dilute the product vision
• Raise Sufficient Seed Capital (if you plan to) that can cover the cost of your first commercial release and also considers for first 2-3 paying customer acquisition cost depending on your Sales Cycle. Early dilutions should not be seen as a threat and should not stop you from raising bigger money (if it’s available)
• Work hard to get Testimonials and References from your initial customer

There are three factors that determine success for a marketplace business:

LIQUIDITY OR CRITICAL MASS

The lifeline of a marketplace (and any platform business for that matter) is liquidity. Liquidity is a state where there are a minimum number of producers and consumers on the marketplace and there is a high expectation of transactions taking place. This is similar to the critical mass of users that is needed on a social network for users to find value in the network. Critical mass is a state where there is enough volume of supply and demand, for transactions to start sparking.

The first and most important metric to watch out for is the percentage of listings that lead to transactions within a certain time period. This serves as a proxy for the efficiency of the marketplace. Merely increasing the number of buyer and seller sign-ups doesn’t serve a purpose unless this metric starts rising. The time period would depend on the category. AirBnB listings would find transactions sooner than listings on a buy-and-sell  real estate marketplace. This could also depend on ticket sizes within the same category. Fiverr and oDesk are both services marketplaces but the turnover on Fiverr is most likely higher, owing to the much smaller ticket sizes.

To get to liquidity, the marketplace also needs to solve the chicken and egg problem and get both buyers and sellers on board. Marketplaces leverage a variety of tactics for circumventing this problem including building single user utility, stealing traction and piggybacking other platforms.

MATCHING: CURATION OF PRODUCTS/SERVICE

Users visit a marketplace with a highly transactional intent and want to find what they’re looking for at the earliest. In this aspect, transaction businesses are remarkably different from engagement businesses. A user visiting AirBnB or Yelp has a specific intent in mind. Hence, the quality of the search algorithm and the intuitiveness of the navigation are critical to delivering value. In contrast, a user visiting Pinterest often wants to spend some time and consume content on the platform. Hence, the infinite scroll!

The efficiency of discovery and matching is critical to a marketplace’s success. Percentage of searches that lead to listing profile visits within the first page of results is one such metric. When listings are served instead, as a feed, the clickthrough per session can serve as a proxy as well. The best metric to track matching efficiency varies with the business model of the marketplace as well as the category.

TRUST: CURATION OF PARTICIPANTS

Building trust is central to marketplaces where transactions carry risk. AirBnB is an example of a player in a high-risk category, that succeeded because of its ability to curate its participants. AirBnB allows hosts and travelers to review each other and has one of the highest review rates among marketplaces. It also takes additional measures to build trust, including having photographers certify a host’s listing.

This was one of the factors that helped AirBnB challenge CraigsListbecause CraigsList never built a strong curation system for participants.

Focus on the trust metric is very important to move from appealing to an early adopter audience to appealing to a mainstream audience. While early adopters use new marketplaces because of the novelty, opening up to a larger market requires the trust and reputation management systems to be alive and kicking.

WHAT’S NOT AS IMPORTANT:

User interface and design are less important with transactional businesses as compared to engagement businesses.

On a marketplace, the ability to search and transact/interact should be as intuitive as possible. Beyond that, the look-and-feel and design are purely hygiene factors. Unlike social networks, marketplaces are transactional and users typically don’t have long visit lengths engaging with the product. Hence, UI is not as important a criterion as the other three mentioned above.

In summary, if you’re building a marketplace:

1. Focus on liquidity, not just user growth

2. At critical mass and beyond, closely track matching efficiency

3. When moving from an early adopter to a mainstream audience, ensure that the trust systems are in place and functioning well.

This article was first featured on Sangeet’s blog, Platform Thinking (http://platformed.info). Platform Thinking has been ranked among the top blogs for startups, globally, by the Harvard Business School Centre for Entrepreneurship

I’ve stated this earlier as well, that it is my firm belief that the software product industry will lift India out of its poverty. While I strongly believe we’re firmly on track to make the prediction come true, I would also like to strike a note of caution. Having been in the industry for close to 25 years new wearing multiple hats and seen it evolve, there are some observations I would like to share with the readers.

Rome wasn’t built in a day. It’s probably the most cliched phrase, but I think it makes sense repeating the cliche once more in the current context. As entrepreneurs and investors, it is indeed important that we celebrate key wins and milestones like funding, new hires, entry into new markets etc. However, we also need look at the larger, long time picture and focus on what is needed to build a meaningfully successful company, a company that creates value for all the stakeholders – founders, employees, investors and most importantly the customers. And it is that part, of envisaging the larger picture and actually painting it, which is a true test of one’s faith in their core beliefs, their endurance and perseverance.

It is said that dramatic changes happen in a dog’s lifetime. Dogs usually live between 10-15 years on an average, and if they were to follow technology they’d be witnesses to some incredible and eventful happenings. Ten years maybe doesn’t seem like too long a time for us humans, but I were to borrow from the tagline of a very popular coffee chain, a lot can happen in ten years! Rewind ten years to this day, and this is what we would be looking at. Facebook, Groupon, Zynga did not exist. Google’s AdSense & LinkedIn were just about to be launched. On the mobile side, Nokia was the largest vendor of mobile phones and Samsung hadn’t introduced mobiles phones in India yet. Seeds of iOS and Android had probably just been sown in the minds of their creators. In the fast-paced world we live in, it’s very easy to miss how much can happen in what now seems like a short period of ten years. But if you take a step back and notice each of the happenings, you’ll realise how impactful and significant these changes are.

The observations and insights from the points mentioned above hold a lot of meaning for us in the Indian software product industry. While it’s very natural and fair to expect things to move quicker, people to be smarter, government and regulators be more friendly, investors be less risk-averse and so on, but it is also important to remember that magic doesn’t happen overnight. However, small wins and milestones added up over time will see your product and your company achieve something significant over time. Moreover, as an entrepreneur, you’ll need to believe in non-linear growth and that there’ll always be a point from where your growth will take off and go the hockey stick way. Remember, that Angry Birds was Rovio’s 52nd game and they were almost bankrupt at the time they released Angry Birds. What if they had given up after their 50th game? Of course I believe in overnight success, and the only overnight success is getting a good night’s sleep! For all other kinds of overnight success, there are miles to go before one sleeps!

I’m reminded of a tagline that Timex watches had for a long time. (A Timex watch)…takes a licking, but keeps on ticking. That’s some inspiration for us entrepreneurs there! I’ll leave you with some vintage Timex commercials. Hope you enjoy them.

http://vintagetimex.homestead.com/farmer.jpg

YouTube Video – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_fKppH8B0g

Happy Building,

]]> http://productnation.in/indian-product-industry-how-far-weve-come-and-how-much-more-to-go/feed/ 4 http://productnation.in/where-does-india-stand-on-innovation/ http://productnation.in/where-does-india-stand-on-innovation/#comments Fri, 17 May 2013 05:30:41 +0000 Rishikesha Krishnan http://productnation.in/?p=3659 How does India stack up on innovation compared to other countries? Are we getting more innovative over time? These are questions I have been grappling with since I started studying innovation more than two decades ago.

In recent times, the growing importance of innovation to economic growth and prosperity has induced many efforts to measure innovation at the national level. In my book From Jugaad to Innovation: The Challenge for India (Utpreraka Foundation, 2010) [FJ2SI], I cited studies like the UNCTAD Innovation Capability Index, Georgia Tech’s High Tech Indicators and the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Innovation Study to show that India is a laggard as far as innovation performance is concerned.

As I noted in FJ2SI, each of these studies emphasized a different set of variables. The UNCTAD approach was based on human capabilities, and therefore focused on human development indicators. The Georgia Tech approach used high tech exports as a proxy for innovation sophistication. And the EIU used patents as its primary measure.

A few years ago, INSEAD and the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) launched a joint effort to develop a more comprehensive innovation index. In a short time, this index has gained credibility with policy-makers. The latest report of this Global Innovation Index (GII) came out last June.

India’s Position

India ranked in the middle of GII 2012 with a rank of 64 out of 141 countries. India’s rank remained virtually unchanged from 2011 to 2012. Apart from the GII itself, the GII methodology involves the computation of three other indices – an innovation output index, an innovation input index, and an innovation efficiency index. India was ranked 40, 96, and 2 respectively on these three measures in 2012.

The innovation input index rests on five pillars: institutions, human capital and research, infrastructure, market sophistication, and business sophistication. The innovation output index consists of knowledge and technology outputs and creative outputs. The innovation efficiency index is based on the ratio of innovation output to innovation input.

To get a clearer sense of where India stands, it is useful to compare India with China, as I did in FJ2SI. China does much better on the GII with a 2012 rank of 34. It was ranked 19, 55 and 1 respectively on innovation output, input, and efficiency.

China outclassed India on 3 of the 5 input pillars – human capital & research, infrastructure, and business sophistication – with a rank difference of 40-50 places. I am not surprised by the huge gap on the first two, but I am certainly intrigued by the huge difference in business sophistication (I’ll come back to this shortly). China was marginally ahead of India on the other two input parameters – institutions and market sophistication.

On the output side, China ranked 5 globally on knowledge and technology outputs while India came in at #47. The only measure on which India did better than China was on the output measure of creative outputs.

Digging Deeper

Looking at the raw scores that underlie the ranks, I found a few interesting contrasts:

• China does much better than India on institutional factors like ease of resolving insolvency and ease of paying taxes;
• The biggest differences between India and China are on the education-related indices of reading skills (a real shocker – India scores 4.41 against 100 for China; but the ASER reports have been showing this for years), and pupil-teacher ratio;
• China’s score on Gross expenditure on R&D is twice that of India;
• China’s score on ISO 14001 environmental certificates is about 7 times that of India (I need to dig into the significance of this number, but I guess the trend is clear enough);
• China’s higher score on business sophistication comes from the proportion of firms offering formal training to their employees (16% for India vs. 85% for China), R&D performed by businesses (34% for India vs. 72% for China), and high-tech imports (this is, I suppose, more reflective of China’s position in high technology manufacturing vis-à-vis India);

India’s bright spots (vis-à-vis China) are:

• Press freedom (not a surprise!);
• Efficiency of energy use;
• Ease of getting credit, and ease of protecting investors;
• Services exports (again, hardly a surprise)

What Needs to be done

The GII underlines something we already know – India’s biggest failure as an independent nation is in the arena of literacy and basic education. No other country with which we compare ourselves has such a poor record on this basic pre-requisite of a modern country. While government initiatives like the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan and the Right to Education Act have belatedly acknowledged this failure, I don’t see a sense of urgency in addressing this problem. This has serious implications not only for innovation but for the very existence and progress of India itself.

While we often rationalize Indian firms not embracing an R&D culture by arguing that perhaps it’s not a business imperative, the fact that Indian firms are laggards on environmental certification as well as training suggests that we are simply not investing enough in the long term future of our enterprises. This is a sobering thought as we contemplate the future of Indian business and the Indian economy, and should be an important subject for reflection by India’s leading industry associations.

Some Concluding Remarks on Innovation Indices

One problem with innovation indices such as the GII is apparent from the above observations: they are constructed on the base of very generic parameters. The variables that are used to measure the GII (like the ease of setting up a business or the ease of paying taxes) seem no different from those used to measure competitiveness or the business environment. At the same time, the GII omits relevant measures such as the level of protection for intellectual property in a particular country.

In an effort to use “objective measures,” these indices appear to be measuring phenomena that are somewhat removed from innovation per se. Instead, the simple OECD model that I adapted for use in FJ2SI seems much more relevant to measuring the environment for innovation, and the resultant innovation output.

Fewer than 150 start-ups are promoted by venture capital or angel investors annually in India compared to over 60,000 angel investments in the US. In 2011, Indian angels, constrained by regulations that make both investing and exits cumbersome, invested only about Rs.100 crore in around 50 deals compared with Rs.2,000 crore angels invested in Canada.

These figures don’t surprise Indian product software start-ups. India has produced few of the world’s leading software products, has 3,400 software product start-ups, and adds 400 every year. But it needs the right environment and incentives to build a world-leading industry.

For several decades, the Indian ownership laws and the investment and business environment have not allowed a conducive setting for the brightest of minds, many of whom have migrated to California. The new Indian entrepreneurs spend significant time on product development to build patentable products with a global market. However, as soon as the product gains traction, venture investors and professionals advise entrepreneurs to move the holding structure, if not the entire business, outside India. The main reasons are as follows:

Financing:

In today’s world talent and ideas are mobile. Singapore, Hong Kong, Chile and the UK are offering attractive financing (debt and equity) to Indian companies to relocate their business. They are also offering tax benefits. This is starting to result in real migration of promising companies out of India.

Maze of rules:

In India, we have foreign direct investment, VCI (venture capital investment), foreign institutional investors, Reserve Bank of India, fair valuations and draconian consequences for inadvertent slip-ups, while in most major economies there are no restrictions.

Taxation:

Capital gains (20%) as well as dividends (dividend distribution tax of 12.5%) even for foreign investors. In most major economies, foreign investors are not taxed on their capital gains and dividend income on their investments and owned businesses. India’s tax policy does not help a product business to attract the right kind of investors and acquirers, and is a hurdle for those interested in foreign acquisition in a stock deal as Indian paper is not an attractive currency. In the UK, for example, investors can write off any investment losses against income, and this significantly reduces their cost of failures.

Open economy:

India does not treat foreign investors on par with local investors, unlike the US, the UK, Europe, Singapore and Hong Kong, which have no restriction on ownership and company structures, and for the most part, regulatory filings (except some strategic and security related issues).

India needs to build an attractive regime to retain the software products business and its intellectual property, which is highly mobile. Incentives and special regimes for businesses that create IP and file for patents will give the industry a big boost. Among the solutions are the liberalized ownership rules with exemptions from regulatory filings and specific regimes (FDI/VCI/FII, etc.), specific exemptions from capital gains and dividend taxes for investors and tax exemption on foreign income of Indian software product companies. Why not go even further and build a fully liberalized virtual special economic zone for ownership and operation of software product companies, with India signing an iron-clad double-taxation avoidance agreement the virtual SEZ.

India needs to proactively grab opportunities, or risk driving the whole industry abroad. We have the potential to create multi-billion dollar global product companies every year, and the benefits could run into trillions of dollars over a decade or two.

This article first appeared in the LiveMint

In an interview with ProductNation, Chandrashekar says he is bullish about designing and selling to the Indian market, but there are some specific challenges hindering SMBs, including low broadband penetration, and ubiquitous and cost-effective access to bandwidth.

1.    What is cloud service brokerage and is this phenomenon really desired?

Gartner defines a Cloud Service Brokerage (CSB) as an entity that will “play an intermediary role in cloud computing… [to] make it easier for organizations to consume and maintain cloud services, particularly when they span multiple providers.” CSBs broker relationships between cloud services consumers and multiple cloud providers, aggregating many services into one place with a single point of catalog management, user administration, access control and security, billing, auditing and reporting, and many other aspects. CSB operators are either Internal CSBs or External CSBs, and some will serve double duty. Internal CSBs are operated by centralized IT organizations that provide internal Cloud AppStores for employees and affiliated members. External CSBs monetize cloud services delivery by aggregating and selling from their own private-branded Cloud Marketplaces. An analogy is how the power grid interconnects energy producers with energy consumers. 

If we are considering a collection of interdependent cloud services taken from separate providers, what sort of help or value would cloud brokerage offer?

Cloud brokerages provide an abstraction layer that enables cloud consumers to have unified control – across disparate cloud services – of catalog management, user provisioning, security (including single sign-on), administration, reporting/auditing, support and billing.

This greatly reduces the overhead costs associated with procuring and life-cycle management for organizations that are incorporating cloud services into their businesses. It also improves their ability to secure and manage how their users interact with disparate cloud providers, to provide a unified support experience, and other benefits.

2.    Could you tell us about Jamcracker’s home-grown cloud services brokerage (CSB), and how do you differentiate yourself? What are your offerings as part of this solution?

Jamcracker develops and markets software, services and an ecosystem of cloud services that enable our customers to become Cloud Services Brokerages (CSBs).  Jamcracker’s CSB enablement solution – the Jamcracker Services Delivery Network (JSDN) includes a cloud services aggregation, delivery, and management platform; a pre-integrated catalog of cloud services; and  best practice enablement services that allow our customers to unify the delivery and life-cycle management of public and private cloud services.

The Jamcracker Services Delivery Network (JSDN) includes a white-labeled cloud aggregation and delivery platform, a global ecosystem of pre-integrated cloud services, and business operations that enable our customers to operate their own Cloud Services Brokerages. The JSDN is a complete services delivery solution that includes hosting, provisioning, licensing management, billing, identity management, compliance management, single sign-on, services administration, business operations and customer support—enabling organizations to get to market quickly and cost-effectively as a Cloud Services Brokerage (CSB).

3.    How will this solution help enterprises streamline their cloud IT services delivery to speed up organizational innovation, and provide a unified usage experience?

Cloud services provide significant benefits to IT operations. From an IT perspective, however, adopting cloud services presents significant challenges. Implementing cloud services from multiple vendors creates cumbersome management and complicated billing, and CIOs have compelling concerns around security, compliance, auditability, accountability and supportability.

A highly effective way for organizations to unify cloud services management and delivery is through internal cloud services brokerages (CSBs). CSBs can help IT provide unified security, compliance, license management, and support.

4.    What have been the pain points in designing a cloud brokerage solution given India’s existing eco system?  What were the challenges faced?

There are two aspects here: designing cloud solutions from India, and designing for the Indian market. In designing cloud brokerage solutions from India, we have benefited from the excellent developer pool in India. Regarding designing and selling to the Indian market, we are bullish but there are some specific challenges hindering SMBs including low broadband penetration, and ubiquitous and cost-effective access to bandwidth. In the next three to five years, we at Jamcracker seek to leverage and contribute to India’s product ecosystem, and bring the latest R&D and innovations in cloud brokerage solutions to innovative Indian enterprises and SMBs.

As an early market mover in this offering what gains have you realized?

Jamcracker is well positioned as a thought-leader and technology-leader with respect to cloud brokerage enablement solutions.  Now that the market is poised to see explosive growth, this puts us in a fantastic position to succeed.

5.    How do you envision the current cloud computing paradigms to evolve? In that context what innovation do you see forthcoming from Jamcracker in the cloud space?

Unifying cloud services delivery and life-cycle management is becoming a well understood need, and to a great extent cloud services brokerage platforms will become the virtual “platform” that combines the innovation advantages of distributed computing with the traditional IT management advantages of standardized platforms.  We’ve seen this need for centralized management controls with every new wave of computing innovation – starting with mainframes, desktops, client-server and the web.

What is your business revenue strategy from this cloud-brokerage solution?

We support a few different models based on our customers’ needs.  In some cases, our revenue is a purely license-based model of our platform, whereas in other cases it’s more of a revenue-share partnership.

6.    Gartner predicts that IT organizations will increasingly be assuming internal “cloud services brokerage” roles. What are the prospects for cloud brokerage in India? How mature is the market for such solutions?

After the U.S., India is the #2 source of cloud-based services development, so the CSB model will be an important one from a supply-side distribution perspective.

From the demand side of the cloud services market, India is an emerging market that is competing on a global stage. In this cloud services will play a critical role in enabling small to mid-sized Indian businesses to leverage IT and application services that would previously have been prohibitively expense for them to purchase and operate on-premise.

Larger Indian businesses that already operate on a global basis will increasingly look to the cloud delivery model as a means for them to compete more cost-effectively and in a more agile manner.

Little did I know that it was not the end of my experience with SiteZ. A few weeks later, I started receiving email ads/spams about properties and other stuff. Spams are nothing new, so I kept ignoring them, till a few months back when I cursorily went down the mail and saw that it (helpfully!) mentioned that I was getting this mail because I registered on SiteZ. It also offered an unsubscribe link, so I was happy. I clicked on it and was informed that I have been unsubscribed. However, that didn’t change anything; mails kept coming. I tried unsubscribing couple more times, with no result. I tried to write to the email address mentioned on their site, the mail bounced. I again searched their website for any link to delete the account, but couldn’t find any. Finally I found that even though the mail sender text says some developer’s name, it actually is sent from a @sitez.com account. So I could block this address, and have some peace of mind.

To be clear, this is not some no-name company, this is one of the top 4-5 job portals in the country. So you would expect them to think more holistically about their product offering and put more efforts in avoiding frustrations for their users, not to talk of delighting them.

In case of SiteZ, incremental tasks/thoughts like below might have gone behind the experience they finally offered to me:

1. Product Management – We want to be like #1 job portal site, so we will build all the usual features.
2. Engineering – Let’s not give a delete account button, it is too hard and can be depriortized since these users are anyway leaving the site.
3. Marketing – Great idea about not giving delete button, this way our metric of # of accounts keeps going up and we can keep using their data (or get them to call us and we can upsell them)
4. Sales/Marketing – Let’s make sure we enroll all our users into our promotions email list, and also make sure they don’t notice it when they are registering.
5. Sales/Marketing – We need more users, so let’s run some promotions like free webinars. We will use it to get the user into registering for the site.
6. Engineering – It is too hard to build a 30-second registration page, so let’s drop the user into the regular registration flow which takes 10 minutes.
7. Sales – Let’s make some money with all this personal data that we collect by selling email campaigns to 3^rd-party.
8. Engineering – It is too hard to implement unsubscribe, can be deprioritized since these users are anyway leaving the campaign.
9. Sales – Great idea engineers. This way, our mailing lists will always have lots of subscribers.

Why am I writing this?

First, it left a very bitter experience in my mouth and now I am very skeptical of any site that asks me to register; I have started reading terms and conditions of the sites that ask me to register, which is a painful process!

Second, and more importantly, I want to make the point about considering end to end experience (including support) as the product, rather than just the core feature set you want to offer to the customer. In this case, my experience with SiteZ was what made me to abandon them, not necessarily the core feature I was looking for (webinar, which I could never reach!). To be clear, SiteZ is not an isolated case, there are a large number of products out there which suffer from this problem of focusing just on the product and not on the experience (see ‘experience is the product‘). Product Managers need to exert more control (and influence) over the overall experience and not just focus on core product, otherwise they will be leaving a lot on the table. Maybe the way is to start from experience when building/changing the product, and embrace ‘experience is the product’.

What is your take on product vs. experience question?

There is a noticeable increase in design sensibility while attending various Meetups and pitching design services to startups. However, there is still a gap in how to make it happen. In other words, how do startups and product managers cover the distance between thinking of design and making it actually happen.

With support from ProductNation, a few design professionals from Design For Use, MakeMyTrip, WoodApple, DSYN, Zomato and U2opia Mobile have formed an informal coalition to help promote the how-tos of design thinking,

Please join us for our launch session this Saturday (May 18th) at the MakeMyTrip office. There will be a talk by Mettl founder, Tonmoy Shinghal, followed up a 3-hour workshop on how to practice Design Thinking in your company by Devika Ganapathy of Anagram Research. Not to mention plenty of networking opportunities during coffee breaks and lunch. Please check out the details and register soon (only 30 participants).