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Second 10 of the 50 Finalists: #InTech50 Most Innovative Products from India

InTech50, a joint initiative by iSPIRT and Terrene Global Leadership Network, that recognizes most promising software products by India’s entrepreneurs, is pleased to confirm the Second set of 10 selected products from over 200 nominations. Check out the First 10 of the 50 Finalists: #InTech50 Most Innovative Products.

InTech50 logoThe elected products that represent inspirational and pioneering concepts in software will be showcased at InTech50 , a two-day event to be held at Bangalore from April 9 -10, 2014, where global CIOs and transformation leaders will be present. 

How we picked out the Top 10 showcase products:

It is quite an honor to be in the InTech50  considering there was an overwhelming response for product nominations.

An esteemed panel of Chief Information Officers (CIOs), venture capitalists, and product leaders from previous successes have evaluated the nominated products.

The products have been selected based on their capabilities and uniqueness, while having the potential to transform the world around us.

The Second 10 finalists for InTech50 2014 Most Innovative Products (in alphabetical order) are:

  1. Contify is a Web Intelligence application for enterprise and teams. The product mines virtually all relevant online sources for information and converts it into easily accessible qualitative and quantitative insights on customers, competitors, and markets.
  2. i7 Networks is a 100% Agentless-way (ZERO-Touch) of detecting all personal devices, secure quadrupled fingerprinting (US patent-pending) of devices and apps etc. and provides network behavioural analysis. It then denies access to infected and compromised personal devices connecting to the network.
  3. KiSSFLOW is business process automation software that is deeply integrated with Google Apps environment. KiSSFLOW is the #1 app in the Google Marketplace in its category and has more than 5000 organizations and active users spread across 120 countries.
  4. Kreeo is a “Collective Intelligence & Unification Platform” for Companies which addresses three important aspects of effective information/knowledge management – Expression, Organization and Discovery (EOD). It provides a unified platform where information is shared/aggregated in various contexts and is intelligently organized around various concepts of relevance.
  5. MindTickle is a cloud based learning platform which enables businesses to create, deliver, manage and track online courses. It is easy to create courses on MindTickle by uploading or embedding existing content (videos, PPTs, PDFs, quizzes, etc.).
  6. RazorFlow Dashboard Framework helps you build interactive dashboards in HTML5 that work well on all modern devices. You can configure components of the dashboard using an intuitive API, which will intelligently render the dashboard according to the capabilities and form-factor of your user’s device.
  7. RippleHire is a technology product that gamifies employee referrals and enables social recruiting. By empowering the most effective way you hire (Employee Referrals), it reduces your hiring cost and effort and unlocks the multiplier in your employee social networks.
  8. Sapience is an innovative, patent-pending software solution that delivers over 20% increase in Work Output, from the existing team. Sapience achieves this through Automated Work Visibility, without requiring any change in process or extra management effort.
  9. SignEasy is a simple and convenient app for businesses and professionals to sign and fill documents from smart phones and tablets. You do not need a printer, scanner or fax machine. SignEasy is currently available on iOS, Android and BlackBerry.
  10. Seclore FileSecure is an Information Rights Management (IRM) solution which allows unstructured information (documents, emails, drawings, images,) to be remote controlled. It is possible to share information but have control: WHO can access the information, WHAT can each person do and WHEN does each person use the information.

Check out the First 10 of the 50 Finalists: #InTech50 Most Innovative Products. Stay tuned for the remaining 30 companies which we plan to announce in the next few days.

 

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Protect your Enterprise Network from infected BYODs – A disruptive product from i7 Networks

Manjunath Gowda (Manju), CEO if i7 Networks, shares his experiences of starting up a products based company, ground up from India. In this freewheeling chat, he discusses on various topics ranging from branding the products, managing investor relationships to seeking IP protection for products offered in a niche, evolving marketplace. Read on…

What was the motivation for you to start i7, a product based company?

The decision to start i7 actually was spurred due to a comment from a CEO of a multinational company. While in discussion with him in the valley, he seemed to indicate we folks from India would never be able to run a product company successfully out of India specifically in networking. While his comment pricked me instantly, I took time to objectively reflect on his observations. After analysis, it occurred to me that I could prove him wrong – since I figured out that we had all ingredients to build one and sustain it too. Besides this, I had just then successfully sold off my previous venture. I was looking at doing something more exciting. All of these converged, and so i7 Networks came to be.

You have chosen to build products in the Internet security space, and specifically addressing the BYOD challenges. Can you explain the reasons behind choosing this segment?

First, the Internet security space is the most volatile and evolving area that businesses need to deal with. Hence there is lot of opportunity to offer disruptive products and services, to meet diverse security needs of enterprise customers. The emerging challenge these days is due to change in the nature of threats. Earlier, most products and solutions were geared towards dealing with threats emanating from sources external to the enterprise. Now, enterprises are grappling with the damage that could be potentially caused due to the internal threats – ones that emerge from within the organization. BYOD is an easy entry point that could cause this. So, we chose to focus on providing products and solutions addressing this area.

How do you differentiate your offering with other players in your field? What are your strategies to achieve competitive advantage?

Our product is disruptive in the segment. Traditional vendors and competition is focused on deploying an agent on to every device that needs to connect to the network in order to discover and manage security threats. We have completely inverted this proposition – and are offering a purely agent-less and zero latency based solution. This means that users won’t in any way be disturbed as they connect their devices to the network and work. The IT policies in enterprises are increasingly being influenced by end users in the company these days. We plan to effectively leverage this shift in the decision making patterns of the IT companies and use it to our advantage.

Since you are offering an unconventional product, what steps are you taking to market your product, so that it is viewed favorably by prospective customers?

The folks in the line of business readily can see the benefits and advantages that our product brings to the table. However, to ensure that we have buy-in from all stakeholders in the enterprise, it is important to make them aware of our product and our strengths. Hence, brand building has become an important activity for us. We do it by positioning ourselves as the thought leaders in the BYOD security space. We are active on all the related forums on BYOD security; we publish and provide insights on BYOD security regularly in leading worldwide magazines, blogs. We are present in all leading conferences on this topic. These have helped us to gain visibility to a large extent. We are seeing some early successes. You should note also that we have not spent much by taking this course to market our product.

Second, recent developments in the world, especially the programs like PRISM from the US government have actually helped us open up new markets and opportunities. A lot of developing countries are now seriously considering evaluating indigenous security solutions rather than depending on MNC based vendors. This is one development which we plan to leverage effectively. In this regard, we are coming up with an alliance of likeminded security solution providers from the developing economies. We intend to form a common forum and through it, we want to engage with governments of emerging countries.

I would imagine that channels are an important aspect of you reaching out to the market. What has been your key learning, working with them?

Dealing with channel partners who operate in services space is entirely different on how one would work with channel partners in the products space. Having come out fresh from selling my services venture, I had a lot to unlearn in this aspect, and learn new ways of dealing with products selling channel partners. In the products space, the channel partners will listen to you only if you can help them solve today’s problems, or if you can solve a real need in the market that has not yet yielded satisfactory outcomes. As always, relationship and transparency builds in trust – and so, we have been able to rope in credible channel partners in East Asia, Europe and US.

I notice that you have repeat investors, even when the nature of your current company is vastly different from your earlier one. In this context, I would like to know what it takes for one to build sustainable relationships with your investors.

I guess being honest and being punctual with my investors helped me a lot. I respect human relationship without expecting anything from them.So, when I need anything it becomes easy to ask something. This is what I think has led to sustained faith being imposed by my investors on my ventures and plans.

You have taken steps to protect your IP by filing patents. Tell us your experiences as you filed your first patent?

I was completely naïve on the aspect of IP for my product. However, when I visited my friends in the Bay Area and discussed my product and its features with them, all of them educated me on the value of protecting my IP, especially given the disruptive nature of the offering. They forced me to file for a patent ASAP. Having done that, and after spending more time with them understanding the nuances and benefits of filing patents, I realize the merits of doing so. I would urge all product entrepreneurs to consider this seriously, especially when your product idea is in a niche, underdeveloped marketplace.

You have used media/PR effectively in both of your ventures. What tips do you have for product entrepreneurs in India regarding these activities?

In India, we tend to focus a lot on engineering/product development aspects, at the expense of other key and important aspects such as positioning and selling your products. One should realize that marketing your product is of paramount importance. Media and other online mechanisms such as blogs, online magazines etc are a great way to reach a wider set of audience. The key thing is to not do these activities in spurts, but as a regular habit. Results from these activities cannot be achieved overnight – it takes time, and a lot of hard work, patience and perseverance. You need to establish yourself as the go to person in the area of the product / offering. You also have to be honest and genuine in your views and opinions. This is how you can build credibility. In summary, never take your foot off the marketing pedal is what I would say.

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M&A is critical for the Product Startup ecosystem in India

Small $20-30m M&A transactions are the lifeblood of Silicon Valley. Over 400 such transactions happened last year. Israeli companies accounted for over 20% of these transactions. India had only a couple of transactions to speak of. This has to change of Indian has to become a Product Nation. 

iSPIRT is focusing on this issue through its soon-to-be-announced M&A Connect Program. The M&A Connect Program team – led by Jay Pullur and Sanjay Shah – was in Silicon Valley last week for listening meetings with various stakeholders. As a part of this exercise they hosted a long brainstorming session with more than a dozen M&A heads of serial acquirers ranging from Facebook to Vmware.

One other listening meeting was with about 20 Indian product entrepreneurs camped in the Valley. I was privileged to attend this meeting. It was a delightful 3.5 hours discussion. There were three set of issues that were discussed. One set of issues related to improving discovery of Indian startups. It turns out that addressing this is not as simple as doing a SV delegation or getting TechCrunch coverage. More than that is needed. The second set of issues related to the regulatory friction of doing small M&A deals in India. The third set of issues were about improving the readiness and preparedness of product entrepreneurs.

There was active participation by all the attendees. These included:

  • Indus Kaitan,Bitzer Mobile
  • Suresh Sambandam,OrangeScape
  • Manjunath M Gowda, i7 Networks
  • Asif Ali, Reduce Data
  • Vamshi Mokshagund, Credii
  • Rohit Nadhani, Cloud Magic
  • Madhur Khandelwal, ShoppingWish –
  • Kumar Rangarajan & Satyam Kundula, LittleEye Labs
  • Deobrat Singh, Gazemetrix
  • Rajan Arora, SchoolAdmissions
  • Bharath Mundiapudi, Orzota
  • Annkur P Agarwal, PriceBaba
  • Srikanth N, Arktan
  • Jay Pullur and Vijay Sundaram, Pramati (they hosted the meeting) 

 

I was most impressed by the dedication and passion of the iSPIRT team driving this effort. Their selfless commitment to making a difference was heartwarming. I could sense that most of us attendees felt the same way. The self-help community that iSPIRT is creating is truly inclusive and impactful. 

If you are product startup interested in exploring a possible M&A exit in the future do watch for more details about the M&A Connect Program. Try and become part of this. Given what I heard in the meeting, I’m sure that this new Program be game changing for the ecosystem.  

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Presentations to CIOSE and the KUDOS!!!

In our latest blog we had written about CIOSE(CIO Strategy Exchange) and  about the 5 companies that were shortlisted to provide a presentation to Ernest M Von Simson and these five companies were 

  • ArrayShield – “Two-Factor Authentication”
  • C2il – “Asset Life Cycle Management”
  • i7 networks – “Agentless BYOD Discovery & Control”
  • Fieldez – “On Demand mobile workforce management”
  • Kreeo – “Knowledge management”

Everyone who presented to Ernie walked out with a smile, with abundant knowledge on how to pitch for the CIO and also what makes sense in the local market and what might not. Ernie was very happy to be the audience for these presentations and he was all praise for the Indian companies and this is what he had to say:

Though the presentations and dialogues were fairly brief, I was impressed by the sophistication shown by the Indian developers of mobility apps and mobility cyber security. They had learned much from analyses of their American counterparts and developed products that produced similar results with much, much lower TCO. “Less is more” in the words of the famous architect Mies van de Rohe.

Manjunath M Gowda, CEO of i7 Networks who was one of the presenters was very happy with the outcome and was amazed how much he knew of  the space and how laser focus were his feedback and this is what he had to say “He knew the subject very well and he asked me the right questions and his help in how to position was amazing. Looking forward for the next step”.

Pavan who is the CEO of ArrayShield was amazed to know how well it can fit into US enterprises too and he was thrilled and he profusely thanked Product nation for providing this opportunity and he said “The feedback and suggestions shared by Ernie was quite valuable, especially good to know that the market demand for our kind of products in US is high and we are addressing an opportunity which is currently under-served”

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CIOSE selects 8 #MadeInIndia product companies to showcase on global platform

CIO Strategy Exchange (CIOSE) has selected 8 companies from India from the #MadeInIndia tag to showcase them on a global platform. Its director Ernest M. von Simson reviewed many applications that were submitted and chose 8 companies to showcase when he is here in Bangalore. The eight companies are Kreeo, Cloudpact, OrangeScape, i7 Networks, C2il, ArrayShield, Anoosmar, and FieldEZ.

CIOSE received many applications from early stage technology startups to those who have spent few years in the industry, with exciting ideas across Big Data, social networking, Analytics, healthcare, education, mobile applications, security, etc., during the one week period starting January 31, 2013 until February 8 2013. The final 8 were selected after several rigorous rounds of screening by CIOSE. 

The demo from these selected companies will happen in Bangalore on Februay 26th and 27th in iGate premises. 

Here are the selected companies and their product details:

  1. Kreeo: Due to information overload, inefficient information discovery and ineffective management of knowledge and learning.  Despite the best of tools from biggest of vendors organizations are not able to significantly enhance knowledge worker productivity.  Kreeo’s innovative “Collective Intelligence” framework and product uniquely combines the power of social computing, PaaS and Big Data in a unified framework (winner of Nasscom Emerge 50 2012 in Innovation category) is used by companies like Standard Chartered Bank to evolve to next level.
  2. CloudPact’s Marble Enterprise: CloudPact Marble is an award winning, unique enterprise mobility platform, with the world’s best cloud hosted mobile application development IDE, smooth enterprise connectivity, security and comprehensive management tools. We help our customers mobile enable their enterprise and extend their business frontier to very edge of mobile reach.  We provide mobility solutions across industry verticals which can be deployed in public clouds, private clouds and also dedicated, traditional IT infrastructure.
  3. OrangeScape: Cloud has disrupted the middleware market with Platform as a Service. All larger enterprise are evaluating PaaS offerings currently. However, there three key capabilities enterprises are looking a) Private Cloud Deployment b) Productivity with greater price performance c) Specialized for B2B Apps. OrangeScape Visual PaaS elegantly address these 3 key requirements when compared Generic PaaS offerings. OrangeScape is featured among the Global Top 10 PaaS companies in research reports of Forrester and Gartner.
  4. i7 Networks – PeregrineGuard: i7 Networks enables enterprises to “say Yes” to BYOD by providing an agentless paradigm for discovery and access control. Our premier offering in this space – PeregrineGuard – enables an intelligent, non-intrusive, clientless way of detecting all devices that are trying to connect to the corporate network. By the use of proprietary algorithms and sophisticated fingerprinting techniques, we extract highly granular information like device-type, device-class, OS, version, user of the device, etc; this information is used to provide device based differential access to corporate assets and to make sure sensitive data is provided right access to the right device type. It integrates with EAS and also provides authentication via AD and also denies access to all jailbroken/rooted/compromised devices. Only those devices that pass the company’s baseline configuration and are registered via EAS are allowed to connect to network for further access.
  5. C2il’s inciseEAM: inCiseEAM Asset life-cycle Management system takes the power, performance and possibilities of Asset management to an entirely new level. Built on a single software platform, inCiseEAM Asset life-cycle Management framework delivers a comprehensive view of all Asset types — production, facilities, transportation and IT — across your enterprise. This holistic perspective allows you to see all your Assets, as well as identify all the untapped potential within them. You gain the knowledge and control you need to closely align your organization’s goals with the overall goals of your business.
  6. ArrayShield’s ArrayShield IDAS: This product addresses the growing threat to enterprises from advanced malware/Trojan based attacks that steal the credentials and attack the enterprise in real time. By protecting the critical organizational data from advanced malware attacks using innovative two factor authentication, enterprises can minimize their security risk and protect their organization data and brand. Globally, Two factor authentication is now being considered as a must have much like anti-virus or firewalls. As per Gartner, 2FA market is expanding by 30% globally and many of the current 2FA mechanisms are flawed like that of hardware tokens, sms based solutions. Hence ArrayShield is uniquely positioned to capture the 2Bn$ global market that is growing at 30% CAGR.
  7. Anoosmar’s Vaultize: The current CIO challenges: 1. with the rapid consumerization of IT and proliferation of consumer solutions like dropbox in enterprise, enterprise IT is looking to control the data loss that might happen through these cloud services 2. traditional file sharing is too cumbersome for roaming users endpoint data (e.g. laptops) is hardly backed up and encrypted. Traditional backups are geared for structured-data (application data) and not unstructured (files) Vaultize provides a unified platform for file backup, file sharing, endpoint encryption and mobility. Vaultize offers this through public cloud, appliance or private-cloud/on-premise. Vaultize’s at-source encryption together with de-duplication helps enterprises adopt cloud based backup and file sharing by eliminating concerns about security, data privacy and compliance. The patent-pending technology secures data even before it leaves endpoints. 
  8. FieldEZ: is an On-Demand mobile based solution that makes managing mobile workforce such as field sales or service teams very efficient and easy. With features such as call management & scheduling, enterprise collaboration, time & location reporting, integrated bar code scanning and payment options, FieldEZ provides valuable field insights to management and boosts the productivity of field personnel while making a positive difference to their work.  It works on common feature phones and smartphones, with a highly responsive user interface, robust security, ease of configuration and web-services for integration. It can work as a standalone Field Service / Sales Management solution or provide the “last mile” mobility to incumbent backend systems.

ProductNation and CIOSE take this opportunity to thank all the participants and like to congratulate the selected 8 companies.

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Indian Product owners solving problems that Indian Business Owners are facing

In the Speaker Lounge at NPC12, I asked Bob Wright what new he saw at the conclave this year. He said this year he sees Indian Product owners solving problems that Indian Business Owners are facing. This SMB market in India is lying legs-wide-apart – only money can be made here.
Here are 3 industries that I believe are fertile grounds in India:
1. Diagnostics – Data that allows the doctor to search through a list of symptoms and identify possible diseases. Usually the earlier you catch the disease – the easier it is to kill it. 
Which is why Vinod Khosla is betting on this company. That heart monitor can go with you everywhere – so there’s a doctor in the world willing to pay for it. Insurance money, hostpital earnings, patient benefits – you can see there’s nothing not to like in it – as long as it does its job cheaply. 
However dependence on hardware is still mandatory in this space. So before you jump in with your cloud-ready software and all that – do note that the doctors haven’t used computers like you have. The still get scared when you ask them to log off their machine and log back in. 
2. Aviation – the Indian government has crippled the Aviation business. There’s a massive gap between government policies (esp. taxation) and consumer need (Cheaper faster travel). Which is all the more why software is needed to bring in automation and tremendous savings for the Service provider – the Airline. Last I checked – that was what the LCC business was all about. 
IBS Plc is one of Kerala’s success stories that’s got logistics sorted through software. But there’s no success story for software that got the Airline industry sorted. Sabre and SAP solve part challenges. Most Airlines have their software custom crapped or have to invest in scary expensive systems built over the last million years. 
3. Parental Policing – Parents are shit scared of their kids getting hooked to the wrong things on the internet. And by scared I mean paranoid. A wireless router that looks sober and protective, priced at around $70, with a cloud based service that allows data reporting on the pad. 
Meraki does enterprise policing. They’re trying to do whaling, but their product can easily be turned around to make mothers feel so much secure.i7 networks – are you listening? 
Do you know any Indian companies in this space? I would love to get a chance to tell their stories.