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Building a Product Ecosystem for Startups in NCR region

Despite a lot of matter that is available and the ease with which people network, setting an Product Startup in the NCR region is fraught with challenges that few can perceive in other parts of the country. For one, it is the sheer size of the region, effectively sprawling across three states, dealing with three different governments which pose a challenge. Gurgaon houses some of the larger MNC Services companies and has a very different approach from Product companies functioning out of Noida.

For most entrepreneurs, running a product startup, challenges are aplenty. It is hard to find the right talent – just not skills but also employees, who understand product development and marketing. Once you develop a product, you will find that customers are unfamiliar with ‘Do it Yourself’ model. It’s altogether a different challenge to scale the sales and product.

If you can relate, you will be happy to know that we are launching a platform for NCR Product Startups. It will be a community driven initiative to help out fellow members in the products space. This will be by the Product guys for the Product passionates.

We have put together a short survey to understand where your main pain points are. This will help us lining up help from experts hidden in deep trenches to positively impact your business. Feel free to forward this to folks who can benefit from this initiative…also dont forget to write to us at [email protected] if you would like to volunteer. Thank you and looking forward to creating something which Product Folks will love 🙂

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Be a part of the journey to Product Nirvana!

There has been a huge upstart in the number of product companies in India in the last 12 months. 700% is the estimate according to Zinnov Consulting. Most of them, as one keynote speaker at the recently held NASSCOM Product Conclave 2012 said ominously or more from experience being in the Silicon Valley, “will fail”. Why startups fail can be due to any number of reasons but the chances of succeeding is unarguably high if employees get product management right! So, what is Product Management? It is the art and science of creating the right product for the right user at the right time and in the process create a successful business! It is the functional domain which asks the questions what products do we build, who is it for, why do they need it, will they buy if we build it and how will the product work?

India Product Management Association (IPMA) is a voluntary, grassroots organization that is dedicated to helping product management as a function grow in maturity and capability all across the country. It is mostly focused on IT products for now. IPMA is organizing, in its second year after launch, the flagship annual event which brings together industry veterans to speak about various product management topics. This year’s theme, built on the confidence in the growth of product companies is, Journey to Product Nirvana! Journey to Product Nirvana takes the attendees from dissecting the nuances of product management across platforms and products to highlighting successes to sharing advice on specific challenges!

All this in a few hours with networking over lunch on Saturday December 8, at Microsoft office on Lavelle Road, Bangalore. The highlight of the event is the keynote by Ram Narayanan, a product management veteran on “Building customer centric product strategy”, a craft, very few get it right! The event also features Mukund Mohan, Pallav Nadhani, Pinkesh Shah, Saran Chatterjee, Sanjay Jain, Sarit Arora, Dhimant Parekh etc on panels.

IPMA has chapters in Bangalore, Pune and one more coming up in New Delhi soon. Visit http://indiapma.org for details or better yet register for this annual event before the limited seating runs out: http://indiapmaannualevent2012.doattend.com/

The event is sponsored by Confianzys and Tally Solutions and hosted by Microsoft.

 

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Product Conclave: Why I Love It

I really loved being there because:

  1. You meet and get to know some really cool people (Sharad, Avinash, Mukund, MR were just a few cool people I met at these events first). There is a bigger list but this will give you some idea of what I am talking about)
  2. The quality of conversations is one of the best in the industry. I have been to several conferences in US and India. This one beats them all.
  3. You get to hear some outstanding plenary sessions (Guy Kawasaki, Vinod Khosla in the past Neil Patel this year)
  4. There is a strong sense of community and a great feeling that you are among some of the smartest entrepreneurs in the country.
  5. It is a place where I love to experiment. The Unconference sessions were one such experiment. I really enjoyed them. I was thrilled to the core when some people showed up in all 4 of them. I was thrilled even more when I heard a few comment  ”we come here because we can discuss our problems”.
  6. If you volunteer for the event (hint, hint) you get to rub shoulders with some of the most dedicated and successful people who are interested in growing the product eco-system. And you get to wear a cool T-shirt that says that “I Put This Together”.
  7. Every one seems so approachable and helpful. This is something I heard over and over again from many of the participants.

I can make a bigger  list, but you get the drift.

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5 speaker quotes @NPC12 & what they mean

5 phrases I heard and overheard at NPC12 and what they mean. I’m open to a thrash-out on this.

1. “Initially I was skeptical about coming to NPC. Now I want to come here every year.”

– First time at NPC + US based speaker with 100% audience feedback. 

Achievers in America are looking towards India. There’s a reason.

The PULSE that ignited so many industries in the 90s with the sudden wave of IT based services has had no follow up. Companies were able to generate value from the cost arbitrage. Labour was (is) cheap and American companies found (find) Indians to be extremely high ROI.

Until now.

The ITES model has not been able to add the same value as earlier. The pipes are drying out. Software demand has moved away from custom services to problem-solving-price-effective-free-support software.

Almost no one wants to pay for software that doesn’t save lives or makes money.

The ITES ecosystem is attracting the lowest ranks of talent. The good and smart ones that remain are breaking out and building products. Or at least in deep contemplation. Much expected – as a nation of the smartest chimps on earth – we’ve been solving the world’s software problems for over 2 decades now. It’s time we build products. And that’s what we are doing. And these speakers now want to come here every year because its helping them.

Watch this space as I share a video about MR asking Ram Shriram a few questions – one of which is a very interesting angle on why bandwidth is a problem solver.

2. “They (Indian s/w products) are looking inwards to solve the problem. India’s HUGE as a market”

– American born and based speaker.

The Indian SMB industry is upwards of $40Bn worth. But adoption is where the challenges are. If I get your payroll problem solved for INR 1.00 per employee per day – would you still worry about hooking yourself up to this system? At its least – you’ll give my system a shot won’t you?

The cost arbitrage that existed earlier through the service model is now visible through the product model. Companies are not just building the problem solution pairs. But they are creating disruption and then asking for very little money in exchange for it.

And they can do it cause they’re based in India. It costs virtually nothing to setup and build a product from India. Selling it globally may seem lucrative – but not everyone intends to go global immediately. Don’t need to.

Flipkart.

3. “Failing is no longer a social taboo” – everyone.

As a social fabric – we Indians have had this problem for a long time. The class topper is celebrated. She gets the biggest chocolate – both in school and at home. The second in class gets a smaller chocolate.

The one who was failing in Math all along but passed this year without any cheating – is considered a failure.

Not anymore. Finding your own battles and winning them is more important than winning battles others have set for you.

Its the pursuit to excellence that’s taken precedence now. Companies and founders are realizing their shortcomings. And are working to address them quickly. And that signifies a major shift in thinking.

Accepting the possibility of failure makes it easier to accept risk. And risk precedes rewards. So as the Indian smartie moves away from the cushy air conditioned cabins to the street side hustle – the ecosystem around him will prevent him from being ridiculed for his failures.

Every little success is being celebrated here.

4. “Indian products still don’t understand their TG perfectly” – Entrepreneur with thorough experience with software products in the valley.

This one is a serious flaw. Not understanding the target group (TG) is a recipe for disaster. And of all the entrepreneurs I met – finding the TG was in many ways the biggest challenge.

This is because what works and what doesn’t needs a qualitative feedback. This means you tell someone what you think they’re doing wrong. And then superimpose that opinion with what can be done right. Perspective is what the NPC community now offers through the Open source model.

See this video to wrap your head around this ‘open-source’ model. Sharad’s articulate mind encapsulates the theory. If you were at NPC – you would have seen it in action. You’re reading this on ProductNation ! 🙂

5. “Stop wasting time on the Blogosphere” – Ex Facebook, ex AOL, investor who speaks harsh truths.

Though in many ways this is important – it also signifies the importance of content and content marketing. I missed cornering Naren Gupta on why he feels marketing talent is low in India and how we can improve it. But to cut a long story short – the noise on the blogosphere is preventing the Indian product owner from creating, marketing, measuring the effectiveness of content and marketing. Independently and as a whole.

Investors, angels, and startups all seem to agree that products with initial traction need to increase the effectiveness of content and its marketing. Reading techcrunch is great to sound smart – but its got no relevance to the Indian ecosystem and how technology products can be built and grown here.

Conferences like the Nasscom Product Conclave are by design meant to share and exchange ideas. It takes a little time for a new comer to get acquainted. But my first time experience volunteering with this community taught me so much. The software product ecosystem is brimming with energy and confidence.

Yes on many fronts we Indians are at rock bottom. But from here,  the only place you can go is up.

If you’re on the boat – grab an oar and start paddling. We gotta take this ship to the other side. Wish you all a very happy good-wins-over-evil festival of lights – Diwali.

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Product LaunchPAD: Putting the spotlight on 9 quality tech products

On day two of the NASSCOM Product Conclave, nine ‘Product LaunchPAD’ companies were announced. These companies were recognized for their high-quality, emerging products.  The gathering, which took place in the ‘Agenda’ hall at the Vivanta by Taj, comprised representatives of the selected companies, industry veterans, the co-hosts of the event (Sharad Sharma and MR Rangaswami) as well as members of the online and offline media communities.

In a time when the product ecosystem in the country is gaining momentum, it’s important to recognize the efforts of companies like these who are focussed on delivering high-quality technology products and putting India on the product map of the world. As Sharad Sharma pointed out while addressing media at the Product LaunchPAD event, the considerable phase of acceleration in the Indian product space demarcates the ‘tigers in the ecosystem’ — but why is it so important for the product ecosystem to grow?

Let’s get some context.

There are two paths that lie in front of India today: either it can go the way the UK went — where globalization hollowed out the the SMB sector — or it can go the way Germany went — where it’s vibrant and thriving SMB industry shaped the development of the country. So what role does the Indian product story have in this situation? Well, the answer to how the Indian SMB story shapes up depends largely on what’s happening in the Indian SMB ecosystem today. And this means that Indian product companies have to embrace new trends like non-traditional business models and cloud-based technology which enable the availability of software at every available price point. Sharad Sharma highlighted the importance of this last point — he drew a parallel to the revolutionary Nokia phone that was priced Rs.2000, which completely changed the way the aam Indian communicated. This is exactly whats happening in the software world today. More often than not, software is the carrier of best practices in new environments, and this is what makes India uniquely poised to start a new journey of transformation.  And this transformation depends largely on the ability of Indian SMBs to re-invent themselves around these new technologies.

Luckily for India, it’s economic structure is quite similar to the German economy. The data tells a strong story : 26% of India’s GDP comes from the SMB sector, which is growing at a much faster pace than the large businesses sector. For the overall Indian economy to treble, this Indian SMB sector has to not just double but treble — because the burden of the growth of the Indian economic sector is dependent on the growth of the SMB sector, which needs technology to help re-invent itself.

The Product LaunchPAD initiative provides a platform for these companies to showcase their products, which have been in the market for at east a few months.

This year, the judges received 54 entries and shortlisted nine companies after much deliberation. Reflecting the current trends in the industry, many of these companies showcased products and concepts revolving around the cloud, localization and location services, mobility, web applications, social media and script-less test automation.

The nine Product LaunchPAD companies selected for 2012 are:

Qualitia Software Pvt. Ltd (Pune): Qualitia is an easy-to-use yet powerful test automation B2B platform which supports leading test automation tools like HP-QTP and IBM- RFT, including open source solutions like Selenium / Webdriver. This is a script-less test automation platform that transforms the way existing QA teams work in organizations. It empower existing QA teams and automated testing teams.

InSync Tech-Fin Solutions Limited (Kolkata): InSync’s product SBOeConnect is a simple, integrated and flexible solution aimed at Magento (an eBay e-commerce platform)  merchants. The product enables fully automatic and bi-directional data synchronization between the SAP Business One ERP system and the Magento e-commerce platform.

The product is already being used by 80+ Magento merchants, as it fulfills a need that e-commerce businesses have which is a need for an integrated ERP system. The company recently launched a Windows 8 application.

Magnasoft Consulting India Pvt. Ltd (Bangalore): Magnasoft focuses on the geospatial industry, specifically on three segments: content (maps), enterprise (large software for corps) and consumer (child safety). Their product NorthStar caters to the third segment, as the company identified a sweet-spot in the area of child-safety in the K-12 ages. The product used Amazon’s cloud platform to offer a subscription based model to parents who pay Rs.50 a month to receive SMSs that tell them when exactly the school bus their child is on will reach the designated bus-stop. The system works with an accuracy of two minutes and focuses on improving the safety and accountability of school bus systems using the RFID system.

Ciafo (Bangalore): Ciafo’s product Frrole sees itself going beyond mainstream media to revolutionize the news industry. It relies on people enabling news to move faster, and champions the thought of news not being controlled by one single entity. With increased direct sharing and historically low trust levels in mainstream media, Frrole presents a revolutionary new alternative for users to discover news about and around them. By promoting citizen journalism, it also hopes to create a society with more symmetrical distribution of news and opinions.

Silver Stripe Software Pvt. Ltd (Chennai): Tour My App is Silver Stripe Software’s new product which aims to increase user engagement and trial conversion in self-serve web apps. When people sign up with web apps online, its important that they know how to use the app by themselves otherwise they lose interest. The product solves the “what should I do next?” pain point. It lets web application developers create guided tours inside their application on the Tour My App site.

Greytip Software Pvt. Ltd. (Bangalore): GreyTip’s product Greytip Online is a cloud based HR and payroll software (SaaS) that is suitable for SME companies who have between ten and 250 employees. It simplifies and automates most payroll and employee data management activities, including statutory calculation and reporting. With this product, the company takes automation to smaller companies in order to make them competitive, but uses Indian prices. It currently has a user base of 95,000 employees.

Pipal Tech Ventures (Bangalore): Pipal Tech’s application is B2C free application that  aims at bringing Google like search capabilities for offline retailers. DelightCircle is the company’s customer engagement and location based marketing platform. The DelightCircle Smartphone app allows consumers to discover places to shop and eat based on their location and interests, and get rewarded for this. There’s also a DelightCircle SMS based app and a DelightCircle website that offer the same capabilities.

SignEasy: SignEasy is an iPhone, iPad and Android application that offers a a simple and quick way to sign and return documents securely from a device. It allows for multiple signers to accelerate professional transactions and close deals from virtually anywhere. The app also allows for text and image insertions and it can be linked to Box, Dropbox and Evernote for retrieval and archiving of documents. It supports several document and image formats and also offers the ability to set a personal passcode to prevent unauthorized access to signatures and files.

 Selasdia (sales aid spelt backwards) is Aiaioo Labs’ product  which is an intelligent sales assistant for brands. It is essentially a CRM system that has access to customer information, which it uses to listen to all that customers are saying on blogs and  other areas online, and capture this information. It tracks blogs, understands the posts and lets brands know when it is relevant to them and the products they are selling. It tells brands what their customers’ interests are, helps them build relationships and helps them find people they should be talking to.

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First Day of NPC 2012 a Roller Coaster between Hope and Reality

A broad sweep of the first day of the NASSCOM Product Conclave gives rise to emotions of a day that rose in energy, stayed sober at the reality picture,
and then gave a reason for cheer as the day drew to a close.

On the shore of Big Blue ocean breakfast session opened up the world of possibilities for Indian product technology. IBM-mers Peter Coldicott (Chief Product Architect), Robert High (IBM Fellow in IBM Watson), and Daniel Yellin (Enterprise Mobility Chief Engineer) perhaps gave a thunderous opening. What products can do and how it can envelope the whole world in its embrace was shown by these three IBMmers. While Robert High showed his project of deciphering human language to understand behaviour to solve people’s problems, using huge chunks of articles data to arrive at solutions for health problems using NLM and cognitive science techniques, Peter Coldicott took “Smart” control of the cities, traffic, commerce, and manufacturing to usher in a Smarter Planet. These two endeavours redefine the role of technology in solving the outstanding problems of humanity and governments. For example, Smarter Traffic will help you negotiate the city traffic by understanding how traffic is regulated and data on what’s real on the road. Daniel Yellin’s mobility solutions through apps would reconfigure enterprise functioning. While IBM is engaged with the whole planet (as it seems to be), Indian product entrepreneurs are just sensing the opportunity on the horizon.

Sharad Sharma’s passionate opening in calling product entrepreneurs transformers of the society gave a sense of purpose beyond the lure of money that gets one to business. His even bolder prediction of product software eliminating poverty gave rise to cheer. “The product entrepreneurs will rule” proposition put product technology on a pedestal. NASSCOM President Som Mittal’s emphasis on the enabling role of NASSCOM by its various initiatives such as it entering into an MOU with SIDBI for risk capital funding of SMEs promised hope. M. Rangsami’s Westward view (or call it Silicon Valley view) of Indian product landscape becoming affordable for millions gave it a mainstream leaning, given that still product entrepreneurship languishes for lack of attention save a few niche communities and select media coverage.

This glorified image was enhanced by Naveen Tiwari’s three mantras of building a billion dollar company. InMobi’s commanding success ranking next only to Google in mobile advertising is a reason for celebration of Indian product entrepreneurship. His trillion ads making $2 billion business impact was transporting us to a dizzy world of big numbers. And the global reach of InMobi in 165 countries employing people of 28 nationalities, less than half of them Indian, gave it a healthy gloss. “We take pride that this company is out of India,” said Naveen, taking with him the aspirations of more than 1200 plus delegates, a major chunk of them product entrepreneurs, to a dizzying high.

The Reality
Soon the hopes that rose high with the keynotes, especially the exuberant one by Tim Paries of Yahoo! on design, surrendered to the reality of so much work left to be done to reach where IBM is today probably taking control of the planet through technology. Product business for Indian SMB market is not VC-fundable, said Pari Natarajan of Zinnov backed by data. The potential user base dramatically shrinks when reality calculations are added. That comes to something like 2000 users in the leather SMB microcluster, for example. Pivoting is not an easy task given various factors such as motivation of employees and financial health of a company. It is a tough and hard decision that product entrepreneurs need to make. “Pivoting is like changing a punctured tyre in a moving vehicle,” said Ashish Kashyap of Ibibo.com, reflecting the real challenges in changing directions of a company.

The failure unconference session by Dorai Thodla attracted a sizeable number of participants willing to pour out. If you started counting failures of product startups, maybe that would make you feel depressed. The rate is high but that’s changing. Product entrepreneurs are evolving to treat failure as a hiccup and move ahead by pivoting or reinventing. The ecosystem is playing a stellar role in holding the entrepeneur’s hope. The sense of issues debated at the unconference as cofounder leaving, developing product before testing the market, and taking care of finance well ahead showed the maturity level of product entrepreneurs in understanding the rough and tumble of this journey. In a typical session like this, a few would have huddled together to exchange views and that’s what Dorai expected. But the huge turnout was a surprise to him but hidden in that was the aspiration of the product entrepreneur to learn from failures that characterizes the entrepreneurial journey.

Raghav Sood, a 15-year-old 10th grader, is the hope of the future. Along with him Thrisha, a 11-year-old, ruled the stage as Archana Rai, the Economic Times journalist, engaged them in a conversation, another novelty to this year’s program. Raghav has now uploaded 8 apps on the Android platform, has authored a book about augmented reality in Android (another book signed up for user interface), and is founder of Appoholics, Inc. What Raghav has done could be dismissed as a genius among a million but if you watched the media closely, reports of teens developing apps are finding a noticeable mention. Some come on the surface and that’s what we think. This holds immense hope for the future as product technology will grow to occupy a prominent position in the Indian technology space in the time frame of 15 years that Sharad Sharma predicted. Together with an army of young entrepreneurs who would have tasted success with app development in their teens, there is a possibility for a robust growth of the Indian product space. Girls like Thrisha, who is developing an app, also lead to your thinking of women playing a greater role in the future. Women delegates were seen in good numbers and that should be an indication of the interest of women in this space.

Founder to CEO
Naeem Zafar gave a realistic account of the role of CEO in his engrossing presentation with a humour embellishment on how founders should be prepared to become CEOs. This transition is perhaps the difficult phase for a founder of an enterprise. But beyond a scale, the founder should make way for an executive better equipped with skills to take the company forward. In this discussion, Prof. Zafar dwelt upon the challenges of a CEO and the focus.

In my view, save the sessions where I did not have an opportunity to participate, the product space has become less inhibiting to test, more
supportive to grow, and, given the holistic dimension of ushering in a better world that IBM has shown the way, it is the future for the world of
depleting resources.

Contributed by Venkatesh Krishnamoorthy, Product Ecosystem Enthusiast

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NASSCOM Product Conclave 2012 Reflects the Arrival of a Vibrant Product Ecosystem in India

The kind of conversations that you heard around product companies are changing. From an ambitious “billion dollar companies” born out of India (the overarching goal of NASSCOM Product Conclave last year), the focus is shifting to the bold prediction of product software’s robust growth, in the coming decade and half, eliminating poverty. In his opening remarks, Sharad Sharma, NASSCOM Product Chair (who I hear across the board is an inspiration to the whole community of product guys) called product entrepreneurs by labels as aggressive as “arms merchants” and “disruptors.” He went on to make a bold prediction: “product industry will lift India out of poverty.” He sought to portray Cloud as instrumental in product space becoming an affordable, productive, and collaborative space that would transform public health centres and schools in India.

Reflecting the evolution of NPC, Som Mittal, President of NASSCOM, said that NPC is a great platform to compete and collaborate. He also revealed that NASSCOM is entering into an MoU with SIDBI to provide risk capital to small companies, which would include IP-led product companies. (SIDBI was provided a fund of Rs. 500 crores in the Union budget for investing in SMBs.) He saw angels, investors, and incubators becoming active in the product ecosystem. Mr. Mittal’s statement that CIOs were open to buying from startups should give product entrepreneurs a sweet ring in the ear.
M.R. Rangasami, co-host of NPC 2012, saw three phases of evolution of the product industry in India: mimicking US to get funding initially, growth of enterprise software in the next decade, followed mobile and Cloud computing causing a paradigm shift in this decade. He was optimistic that software products offered at low price points offered by product entrepreneurs (leveraging the Cloud) will be consumed by thousands of customers.
Naveen Tiwari’s Leap of Faith

In a sort of answer to the overarching question of a billion dollar business emerging from India (the same time around last year when Flipkart was rumoured to have obtained a billion dollar valuation), InMobi, a mobile advertising ecosystem player, has emerged as perhaps the biggest company to grow out of India in the last 5 years. Naveen Tiwari’s keynote should be remembered for something alien to product entrepreneurs in India: talking numbers that are in the million and billion range—a trillion ads providing $2 billion worth of economic transactions, reaching 80 million people across 165 countries. The mercurial growth of InMobi has been made possible by the “Think Big” approach of the team and not being complacent with the present status. The company is devising methods to grow five to ten times in the 5 years from now. Naveen Tiwari said that massive scale happens with huge risks and the InMobi team was willing to bet on it. Aiming big, going global, and hiring the best are the three mantras Naveen Tiwari proposed to build a similar company in India.

Ram Shriram’s Bet on Mobile and Tim Parsey’s REM
The man with the Midas touch could not touch down at Bangalore as personal commitment stayed him put in the United States. Ram Shriram of Sherpalo Ventures who delivered the keynote on video sought to paint a glorious future for mobile phone-based innovations going by the sheer number of them. (An exclusive coverage will be done on his address.)

As M. Rangsami announced the TED-like speech of Tim Parsey of Yahoo!, who has changed seven domains and as many companies, it brought a fresh whiff of outside air. Instead of thinking inside, this change of thinking by organizers to bring in someone with a different perspective seemed to have carried well. Tim Parsey gave an absorbing, exuberant keynote on design being important for products. Using the bicycle as an example of his REM framework, he translated the evolution of bicycle to products within the REM framework. Rational value, Emotional, and Meaningful are important components of the design, in Tim Parsey’s philosophy. A rational value in terms of performance and new capabilities, designing for feeling, classic minimalist, and ultraminimalist (appealing emotionally) styles, and being meaningful (aligning to values and evoking personal memories) make a product appealing to the customer. The design principles and design culture should be enticing for the employees as well as end customers for whom the product is aimed at, he emphasized.

So many of them, which one to go?—Indian SMB market too small
End of keynotes opened up to six parallel sessions and thankfully one was cancelled. The sheer excitement of peeping into several sessions would have satiated the delegate but wouldn’t have had a carry on their learning. Color codes in the Agenda clearly showed the prospective audience base for the sessions. If I would have made a point of covering them all, I would have left the readers disappointed with piecemeal quotes that wouldn’t serve purpose. I stayed on with one session per slot. In a curiosity to understand the Indian market, I walked in with a lot of hope of three wise men telling us how Indian market so big as an ocean could be tamed with a magic wand. In the end, despite “doom and gloom” sought to be avoided, Indian market despite millions of potential customers turns to be less attractive for a product entrepreneur if segments are suitably sliced. Pari Natarajan of Zinnov showed the microcluster of leather SMEs finally boiling down to 2000 users. Terming product business in India for SMBs non-VC fundable (implying lack of scale), Pari however said e-commerce is a robust segment. Naru Narayanan, investor, mentor, and former executive selling retail products across India, cautioned the lure of big numbers. He sought to convey that any big number showcased should be treated with caution and provided his guestimate method of arriving at a rational figure. Vijay Anand put the conversation in perspective by bringing down the glorious 900 million mobile users to an active 300 million (multiple SIMs being the discounting factor). Despite the promise of the billion plus, Indian market is yet to become technophilic. Technology touches a niche and not yet mainstream.

This led me to a conversation with Kishore Mandyam of PK4 Software, who led a panel on AWSME Survey, the Nielsen survey commissioned by NASSCOM to look into the SMB market in India. This is an awareness survey by NASSCOM to understand what ails the SMBs in terms of buying software. In over a 1000 SMBs surveyed, it was known that only 30% of SMB owners were approached by a software provider and for example in Kochi, 86% of SMBs were not approached. Out of them, only 9% know the term Cloud computing. To make SMBs adopt technology massively, NASSCOM mandated this survey to drive its Software Laga Do Yaar! Mission. The survey will be used to further enhance the market penetration of software by understanding pain points, influencers, and decision makers by a follow-up engagement perhaps by using case studies to influence buying decisions.

Pivoting is painful is what I got to understand in the panel discussion on pivoting. Naveen Tiwari, Ashish Kashyap of Ibibo, Rajat Agarwalla of RJ Softwares were engaged in a panel led by Shruthi Chella of Groupon. Instituting pivot as part of culture is next to impossible. Pivoting in a small company is easier whereas in a big company, it is first tested within a small group before massive adoption. Customer needs, market opportunities, and competitive advantage drive pivoting. Ashish called pivoting as “changing punctured tyre of a car in motion.”

As the afternoon set in and more sessions awaited, the delegates swarmed the lunch area exchanging contact details and engaged in conversations.

Contributed by K. Venkatesh, VirtualPaper for YourStory.in

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NPC 2012 starts off on a high energy note!

Wow, what an energetic first day of the NASSCOM Product Conclave 2012!

The ninth edition of the NASSCOM Product Conclave began with an opening address by the two co-hosts, Sharad Sharma and M.R Rangaswami who welcomed delegates and introduced them to the theme of the event this year, which revolves around the emerging technologies of Cloud, Mobility and Big Data. Some important points that Sharad Sharma made included highlighting the fact that till a few years ago, product development was more of an underground movement. He also pointed out that product entrepreneurs are fundamentally different from other entrepreneurs in the way that they are the anti-thesis of the traditional client-server model as they are literally disruptors who are focussed on transforming the lives of their customers totally. He also shed some light on the problems that the tech product industry faces today that prevent many people from seeing the complete potential clearly, such as the generational shift leading to a disconnect. In reality, the product industry will accelerate exponentially — and according to Sharad Sharma — can even lift India out of poverty!

The two co-hosts were then joined on stage by the President of NASSCOM, Mr. Som Mittal, who continued the flow of thought by saying that today, entrepreneurship is being celebrated across the world and in India. He pointed out that there are a number of entrepreneurs today who are open about the fact that they have tried and failed previously, but are willing to try again. The technology buyer is also changing, as this buyer is excited about finding solutions for the real problems that he or she faces.

M.R Rangaswami then gave the audience some insights on why the Indian tech product industry is poised to grow at an accelerated pace. He pointed out that many product entrepreneurs come equipped with enterprise experience, which is invaluable. There are also 900 million mobiles in the country which present an immense opportunity for product developers. The third aspect of this fertile product ecosystem is the emergence of cloud technology that improves accessibility — you can be sitting in one corner of the country and still market your cloud based products to customers at another end.

Did you attend Day 1 of the NASSCOM Product Conclave 2012? Which sessions were your favorite?

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SaaS and Silicon Valley are Game-Changers in India

A revolution is taking place in India’s businesses, which is transforming India at large. It began with mobile phones. Although there were telephones in India prior to mobile phones, they never took off in a big way. But mobile phones are so inexpensive and provide such great benefits that now everybody has a phone. The software-as-a-service model is a similar phenomenon in that SaaS fills a void that could not be filled in any other way. SaaS is an inexpensive way for India’s businesses to have good-quality software that makes their businesses much more efficient and effective.

SaaS will be even more of a game-changer in India than it has been in the United States. It’s not just because of the pricing model; it’s also because the time is right. SaaS products are proliferating at the same time as ubiquitous mobile devices and the flood of Big Data are causing companies to look for new business solutions. As businesses embrace SaaS for their critical business functions, they get more velocity in their business, which makes them more competitive in their markets.

Local products — made by local Indian software companies that understand the local business needs — are a key factor in the growing use of SaaS solutions. Improvement of Internet services in India has also contributed to SaaS adoption. A third factor is the fear that not using SaaS solutions will cause a company to be an outlier. This was not the case a couple of years ago. So it’s a tipping point-phenomenon coupled with more availability of local products at a very attractive price point.

A major transition is underway in the technology stack. In the life cycle of the software industry, new solutions typically come from startups and small companies as opposed to large companies. We see this happening again today in India where the small, nimble startups are shifting their business to create SaaS solutions. Even so, some startups are dramatically more successful than others, due in large part to two enablers.

Read the Complete article at Sandhill.com

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Product Conclave – One of the Most Exciting Event for Product Entrepreneurs

One of the most exciting product events in India starts next week. It is called Product Conclave and there, you will find one of the best gathering of product entrepreneurs and product ecosystem supporters. If you have already registered and attending it, I would love to meet you. If not, some of us will try to convey the excitement, spirit and knowledge from the event through various social media activities.

Here are some resources for you to start understanding what goes on at this event.

  1. Here is a link to the web site of the main event which provides an overview and bits of history
  2. Here is the agenda one of the best I have seen at any conference focused totally on entrepreneurs
  3. Here are some blogs to watch – the official blog and productnation blog
  4. A twitter stream
  5. A Facebook Page for Product Conclave
  6. I set up Indian Product Companies Informal Networking Group on LinkedIn . It is an open group. Feel free to join and introduce yourself. If you are planning to attend the event, let us try to gather during some breaks and get to know one another. If you have ideas on networking please share them on a thread there.
  7. I will be collaborating with a few more entrepreneurs and managing some unconference style sessions. If you are interested, please go to this link and vote for existing ideas or feel free to add your own. We will take the top three ideas and turn them into unconference style sessions.  More on the process we follow in another blog post.

I will start a series of posts on the (unconference style) sessions I will be moderating and participating in.  So be prepared for a higher rate of posts than normal. I will prefix all of them with Product Conclave (and tag them as well).

I need a favor from you. If you think there are other sources of information – individual blogs (for example), please do leave a comment with a link. I will create another post with an expanded set of links.

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Let the world know about your software product

LaunchPad

You’ve spent months and days and hours conceptualizing your product and then taking it to market. You’ve won the first few customers who are now stable and you’re thinking about what next…if you’ve achieved this, it’s time to show your product to the world.

The NASSCOM Product Conclave LaunchPAD is the place you should be to demonstrate your product and recount your journey from CONCEPT to REALITY. We’re inviting a select community to hear about you and your product. Won’t you come?

A day before NASSCOM Product Conclave kicks-off in Bangalore (November 6, 2012), we are pleased to host an exclusive interactive session with the media, blogger and analyst community where you have the opportunity to launch your new product and enjoy your moment in the spotlight. Last year we had some of the crème-de-la-crème of press attending the event and reporting it in the print and online media.

Who is eligible?
If you are an Indian software product company that has a software product in the market for at least six months and has at least one revenue generating (not beta!) customer, then you are eligible to participate. Apply for the Product LaunchPAD here before October 25, 2012.

What happens next?
NASSCOM shortlists eligible companies and informs them by October 30, 2012 Present your software product to the media at an exclusive event.

Publish a booklet containing information about your company and software product which will be circulated to the media and available online on the NASSCOM Product Conclave website. Opportunity to interact with a focused group of professionals and hear their feedback on your product.

Some of the folks who will help us short-list some great Products are:

Amit Somani, Arun Katiyar, Suresh Sambandam

Need further help?
If you need advice on how to structure your launch pitch or presentation, then please do let us know. Also we have many curated sessions at product conclave to help you take your software product initiatives even further. If you haven’t registered, then do so NOW!

See you at the NASSCOM Product Conclave – the place to connect with Indian Products Ecosystem.