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Brace up all Product Entrepreneurs; InTech50 is back…

InTech50, iSPIRT ’s flagship event is back. The first two editions have been very successful and InTech50 has become the ‘must-go-to’ platform for enterprise CXO’s and product entrepreneurs. Over the past two years, we have hosted CXO’s and business leaders from global companies like AllState, Citibank, HCC Insurance, Standard Chartered, Colgate Palmolive, Time, AirTel, Yes Bank, Exide Life, Mother Diary and the likes. Here are some quick high points from the last two years of InTech50:

  • 18 enterprise deals that got originated and closed from conversations at InTech50
  • 42 enterprise PoC’s offered to InTech50 companies
  • 120+ innovation leaders (read: buyers & influencers) exposed to Indian product entrepreneurs

We have already managed to showcase over a 100 companies, and we have made 50 global investors and CIO’s travel to India to interact and associate with these companies, and happily so.

Here are a few portfolio companies from our past events – Capillary, Uniken, Seclore, Freshdesk, Reverie, Sapience, NowFloats, ToneTag to name a few.

Just to share the impact that we have created, and how these 50 companies have benefitted from this initiative, hear hear what some of them had to say –

“Intech50 is a phenomenal event. It is probably the highest RoI initiative we have ever participated in. With 50+ Global CIOs turning up, it is a great platform to validate your product. Met some of the largest enterprises, found use cases we weren’t aware of and closed marquee deals. Highly recommended!” Yamini Bhat, Vymo.in

“Intech50 was extremely useful in 3 ways. First, making a presentation of just 5 minutes to an extremely discerning audience helped us make our value proposition very crisp. Second, demoing our product to several heads of technology helped validate our product and use cases, and resulted in actual business deals getting signed. And most importantly, we were able to bag a large client with whom we’ve been able to co-create 2 completely new products. I wholeheartedly and highly recommend Intech50 to all B2B startups who have demonstrable products that are ready for large enterprises” – Ranjit Nair, Germin8

“Being a part of InTech50 2015 was a great opportunity for ToneTag. It was exhilarating when ToneTag was selected in the first batch as one of the top 10 products. The event gave us the exposure, guidance and support we needed. InTech50 enabled us to pitch our product to a global panel of curators and the media coverage we received was also been beneficiary to the company. Since winning InTech50, ToneTag has been expanding rapidly. We acquired many leads through the event that led us to PoC’s and commercial deals in the making. The resources we received through InTech50 have been invaluable as it has helped us build exciting partnerships with many in India and around the world” – Kumar Abhishek, ToneTag

If you are a product entrepreneur and your product is solving a problem for the enterprise CXO, InTech50 is your chance to showcase your product to the who’s who in the enterprise buyer community.

Apply before Feb 22nd 2016 and experience a bigger and better InTech50 in 2016.

To know more, click here.

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iSPIRT Meeting at PMO – Stay in India Checklist

An important policy agenda for iSPIRT is to reverse the exodus of technology startups. About 75% of the funded technology startups are redomiciling outside India due to regulatory irritants.

iSPIRT has a Policy Expert Team – called Stay-and-List-in-India – working only on this area since December 2014. This is the policy team that worked closely with SEBI on the “startup bourse” that was notified earlier this year. Mr. Mohandas Pai has been an important guide and mentor to this team.

The Stay-and-List-in-India Policy Expert Team has developed a Stay-in-India checklist. This has 36 items that need to be addressed by Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Corporate Affairs, RBI and DIPP.

After PM Modi’s Silicon Valley visit, Mr. Amitabh Kant, Secretary DIPP, has been pushing hard to make progress on the Stay-in-India checklist. Towards this end, he had organized a cross-ministerial meeting with iSPIRT that was chaired by Mr. Nripendra Misra, Principal Secretary – PMO. The meeting was attended by Secretaries including Mr Madhav Lal, Ministry of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises; Mr Ashok Lavasa, Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change; Dr. Hasmukh Adhia, Department of Revenue, Mr Shaktikanta Das Department of Economic Affairs, both from Ministry of Finance; Mr. Tapan Ray, Ministry of Corporate Affairs; Mr Ashutosh Sharma, Department of Science & Technology and Mr Krishnaswamy Vijayraghavan, Department of Biotechnology both from Ministry of Science & Technology.

Others present included, Mr Shatrughna Singh, Additional Secretary, DIPP; Ms Snehlata Shrivastava, Additional Secretary, Department of Financial Services, Dr. Renu Swarup, Sr. Advisor, Department of Biotechnology, Mr U S Paliwal, Executive Director, Reserve Bank of India, Mr Hemang Jani, OSD to PM and Operations Officer from the World Bank.

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There were three parts in the meeting. The first part was a showcase of 6 technology startups. This was curated, as usual, by Shekhar Kirani, Fellow, iSPIRT (Accel Partners) and Avinash Raghava. The purpose of this session was to highlight that tech startups are key to transforming India at large. They are setup by entrepreneurs from middle class backgrounds who parley their skills into sweat equity to build valuable businesses. The showcased companies included CRMNext, Foradian Technologies, Eko India Financial Services, Snapdeal, Uniken, ForusHealth and Team Indus. They all made carefully prepared 3 min presentations and answered questions.

The Stay-in-India Checklist was discussed in the second part of the meeting. Sanjay Khan (Khaitan Associates) of the Policy Expert Team made the presentation. This was a technical discussion on specific issues. At times, it was very detailed.

In particular, Mr. Shaktikanta Das, Secretary, Department of Economic Affairs, Ministry of Finance and Mr. Amitabh Kant, Secretary, Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP) were very proactive in taking suggestions. Mr. Kant did say that they are trying to create a single window to deal with startups.

In the third part of the meeting, there was short discussion about teaching entrepreneurship as a minor in engineering education. This was led by Sanjay Vijaykumar of Startup Village. His talk was very passionate and impactful.

It was cleart that all the officials were determined to make quick progress and were truly concerned by the exodus of tech startups from India. We all ended the meeting with a group photo. One of the senior officials remarked that this moment is important to capture so that we can look back and remember where it all started!

Guest Post by Abhishek Sinha, CEO, Eko India Financial Services 

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Chief Economic Advisor is Infected Positively by the Irrational Exuberance of Indian Product Startups.

Mr. Arvind Subramanian, Chief Economic Advisor to the Government of INDIA, has been named as one of the world’s top 100 global thinkers by Foreign Policy magazine. After stepping into the shoes of Dr. Raghuram Rajan as Chief Economic Advisor, he is also a widely cited expert on the changing Balance of Global Economic power, as it pertains to INDIA & China. He is also the author of “INDIA’s TURN: Understanding the Economic Transformation“. Mr. Arvind specially travelled to Bangalore to interact with software product industry and discuss policy with the the policy team of iSPIRT Think tank.


In the 4 hour meeting, the energy that emerging companies brought out with each presentation was amplified as the discussion progressed. In the end, I must admit that there was a euphoric feeling that this movement of creating public goods with the Social Commons model is really on-to-something BIG!

Not all elements of the session can be reproduced here, but this article is an effort to provide you the important highlights.

2015-05-28 17.36.55What was so Infectious? Its the Mirror Neurons, Stupid! 

In the first session, as it has become customary, about 8 carefully curated product startups which started in INDIA, with audacious aspirations, and which have already made significant GLOBAL impact while still retaining their Indian-ness, presented their stories. Almost every story was about Product Entrepreneur’s who dared to dream BIG, not just from themselves but for leap-frogging INDIA and the world. The Goal set out for the session was to show-case the behind-the-scenes transformation that is taking place in the software Product Industry landscape.

The Irrational choices of many Entrepreneurs were show-cased in their business avatars, as NowFloats, Uniken, Tally, Forus Health, Team Indus, FreeCharge, SnapBizz & Ezetap. While the strategy choices seemed Irrational, the success these business are having today, and the impact they can have tomorrow to reclaim India’s glory was self-evident. The outcome of the session was remarkably different from the goal the session set-out to achieve. What became apparent as the session progressed was the infectious effect it was having on each participant in the room. It was as if the Mirror Neurons from these passionate Entrepreneurs was affecting not just the minds, but it was affecting our Inner Spirit. The Infectious nature of the session’s outcome in many ways mirrored the outcome of these businesses.

2015-05-28 17.37.06What is the Cure? More Infection. Make India Go Cashless.

In a thoughtful next session the discussion moved toward more earthy and material realization of how Technology & Infectious energy of the startups can be leveraged to leapfrog INDIA. This discussion was about how to make India Go Cashless in 4 years. The benefits of going cashless are many. It can expand micro-credit to small businesses in a big way, for even street-hawkers (Thelewalas) to be able to digitally get credit and also seamlessly receive money from customers. Sanjay Jain (iSPIRT Open API Expert Team member, former Chief Product Officer of Aadhaar) and Abhishek (iSPIRT Colunteer, CEO Eko) presented a comprehensive approach and suggested a new Program, Jan Samridhi, for the Government. This builds on the Open API work that iSPIRT has already done (in eSign, UPI and GTSN) and proposed specific and inter-related policy and regulatory changes. The only real way of achieving this is to have more agencies in the Government, the Regulatory institutions and people to participate. So in effect, the cure really is to infect more people with the Spirit of Social Commons. The discussion clearly bridged some the intellectual distance between Delhi and Bangalore.

Advice from the Chief Economic Advisor

Mr Arvind, in his own-words was blown-away with the enthusiastic zeal and business performance of the Product Startup Ecosystem. He however was also clearly in his elements as he carefully constructed the broader picture by taking the various elements from the Individual presentations. Some of his suggestions and advice to the Startup community were as follows.

  • How soon can we marry the Private Entrepreneurial zeal & Public Goods created by such movements?
  • Can we use and leverage the existing products automating, say, Govt Fair Price shops?
  • While mildly chiding Product Entrepreneurs to dream even bigger by including Government, he asked if we can help realize other broader over-reaching goals like Government Technology Platforms for Expenditure tracking?

He even offered to visit Bangalore and participate 2-3 times a month in various such initiatives to enable routine conversations with Policy Makers and Entrepreneurs.

2015-05-28 18.27.33Conclusion

The entire program was highly Interactive, Infectious & Confidence building. It gave a sense that may-be within 4 years we can Make India go cashless. It also re-affirmed the new Paradigm of creating Public Goods with a Social Commons approach (Open source approach). It is important to co-create a digital INDIA, not just with the Entrepreneurial zeal, but by getting Government and Institutional bodies involved as well. These Infectious power-packed dialogs that iSPIRT is fostering will help us rewrite the script of our Nation, and will help us reclaim its lost Glory. We will become a Product Nation soon, it seems inevitable. Be a part of it now. Go ahead, spread the INFECTION, not just the word.

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Announcing the 3rd batch of 10 companies @InTech50 2015

InTech50 2015 (a flagship event of iSPIRT & Terenne Global) is happy to announce the third batch of 10 finalists.

Congratulations to all the following finalists…listed alphabetically. The first and second batch of 10 companies has been announced before.

InTech50

  • 42Gears – 42Gears Mobility Systems Pvt. Ltd is software company based in Bangalore, India.More than 5000 companies in 50 countries around the world use 42Gears products to increase their mobile workforce productivity, reduce costs and increase profits. Businesses in retail, manufacturing, healthcare, government, logistics, education and other industries form our customer base.
  • Aujas – Aujas helps organizations manage information security risks by protecting data, software, people and identities in alignment with best practices and compliance requirements. We also help strengthen security governance and intelligence frameworks.
  • Customer XPS – CustomerXPs is revolutionizing Sales, Marketing and Fraud Management in fortune 500 banks by harnessing the power of extreme real-time BIG DATA
  • Ideal Analytics – Helps you in free data analysis in cloud; connect to your data and explore;
  • I-exceed Technology – i-exceed is a technology products and services company. We currently operate across two major business lines, viz. products (Appzillon) and services (BFSI consulting services, Mobile Consulting Services Performance Management and Oil & Gas Technology Services). Appzillon, our flagship product, is a feature rich, agile and flexible cross-platform suite to build apps for smartphones, tablets and browsers
  • Indusface – Indusface provides organisations with a complete suite of comprehensive application security solutions to protect their web and mobile applications from online attacks and assist them in meeting the standards set by compliance regulators.
  • KPoint Technologies – kPoint Technologies offers kPoint – a cloud-based enterprise video platform – that makes your video content discoverable, mobile and social. kPoint enables organizations with a complete range of do-it-yourself tools, packaged as an integrated platform, for use of videos in the enterprise.
  • Olivo – Fully Integrated Patient Centric Care Solution
  • Uniken – Uniken provides a digital access platform REL-ID which provisions mutual trust in the digital relationships and protects digital interactions and data.
  • Zenatix – Zenatix’ mission is to empower energy consumers with data, insights and recommendations that will drive energy savings. Our solutions enable the energy consumers monitor their energy consumption pattern at various system/appliances levels, and take actions based on the recommendations driven by our energy analytics.

Watch this space, as we will announce the fourth batch shortly. Check the first batch of 10 companies and the second batch of 10 companies here. 

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RBI Governor Dr. Raghuram Rajan meets Product Startups.

He is a maverick, a reformer, a decision maker and above all the Governor of Reserve Bank of India. The country’s foremost authority in Economics met with Product startups in Bangalore to understand their challenges and also provide useful advise by participating in interactive sessions for close to 3 hours.

2015-02-27 10.23.43
Yesterday, at ITC Windsor Manor, Dr Raghuram Rajan, honorable governor of RBI, along with Industry stalwarts Mohan Das Pai, Sudhir Sethi, MD of IDG Ventures, Shekar Kirani, Accel Partners, Sharad Sharma (iSPIRT), Bharat Goenka (Tally) and many other industry leaders heard the stories of about 10 Indian startups. The idea was to understand the following challenges of the startup Ecosystem

  1. Startups from India Competing with Global Giants with Capital Markets Challenges (like raising capital from Domestic FIIs, listing for IPOs, and other book building challenges)
  2. Startups from India building Software and Technology Products and solving local and domestic problems with the new & developing landscape of Consumer Market Challenges (like changing landscape of payments, pre-payments, recurring payments, etc)
  3. Product Companies like Tally and others from India, empowering small and medium businesses in INDIA to become Digital SMEs for leap-frogging the Indian Economy.

Dr. Rajan, was very forthcoming with his following admissions and suggestions.

  • Some of some of the difficulties in moving money in and Out of the Country (FEMA regulations for example), requires a more coherent set of rules, regulations and systems.
  • He also suggested that all Institutions, need to keep pace with the technological advances, and the need was really to have an Inclusive approach to carry everyone forward.
  • He assured full commitment to the Payments Systems Revolution, highlighting that
    • Payment Banks and Small Banks will be in full steam in about 12-18 months
    • Innovative ideas of White-labeling of BCs (Business Correspondents) via Individuals, Corporations or Registered Companies was actively being discussed.
  • His willingness to open up a dialog with Innovative Companies, where Banks are a purchaser of Technology was also evident in his offer to have more follow-on meeting.

Close to 180 minutes of conversation and showcasing of New Product Startups and Business Houses like Tally from Bangalore. Around 8 companies got the opportunity to showcase and highlight their challenges and directly interface with the Dr Rajan himself. Not all elements of the session can be reproduced here, but below are some of the key highlights and learnings.

2015-02-27 10.24.32Home grown Startups share their Stories with RBI

About 10 Indian Startups which started in INDIA, and which have global operations today, presented their stories not just from a valuation and growth standpoint, but from an emotional and proud-to-be an Indian startup viewpoint. To sum it up, almost every story was about Entrepreneur’s who dared to dream something not only for them, but for INDIA, and today want the Indian Systems (Regulators, Government and Institutions) to reciprocate to their needs. They highlighted their list of issues, the below checklist includes, but is not limited, to the following.

  • InMobi’s Naveen Tiwari, believed that INDIA can be the HUB for solving Global problems and with 39 other startups which have spun-off from INMOBI, it was clear that there is a 10x growth that is possible in the Indian startup eco-system.
  • Uniken a Security startup company with solutions for the Hyper-connected world, spoke about how their solutions have been deployed by Global and Indian Banks, including Bynet Communications. They stressed the need for all Indian Banks to adopt the latest solutions from India Solution Providers themselves which are on par or better than many cutting-edge solutions from outside of INDIA.
  • Fintellix highlighted their Software for GRC Intelligence (Governance, Regulation and Compliance), which are today used by both Indian and Global Private Banks, but they cannot get through even the RFP process of many Public Sector Banks, due to archiac processes.
  • Freshdesk presented a crowd sourced Customer Support Platform for Businesses, Tally Spoke about large scale adoption of their Accounting Software by SMEs (in millions), FORUS presented their home-grown medical devices (3nethra) which could be adopted by Indian Hospitals for 1/3 the cost, and how 80% of issues leading to Blindness can be prevented, while SnapBizz showed how even Kirana Store business owners today could gain improved visibility using the SnapBizz cloud platform.
  • Team INDUS and Deck.in showed, how Indian startups are turning world-beaters with their big ambitions in Aerospace and Enterpsie Software solutions.
  • Bharat Goenka and Pramod highlighted the need for Separation of Concerns between Transaction Enablers (Banks) and Technology Providers. Goenka stressed that Velocity of Growth, is dependent directly on the velocity of transactions.

Insights and Learnings from RBI and Dr. Rajan.

There were many learnings for all participating Startup & Business Entrepreneurs. Some of the key ones are

  • Dr. Rajan believes that for Capital availability & Funding Process for Innovators there needs to be a different RISK Framework that needs to adopted. The existing RISK framework was meant to keep the bad-elements away from the System. The new RISK framework should look at being a support system for Good Innovators.
  • Dr. Rajan also was open to look at enabling PUT-OPTIONs which will provide down-side risk protection for atleast the Investment-value like in WESTERN Contracts.
  • Dr. Rajan however, said we must all be cautious of Back-door debt masquerading as Equity and causing Systemic Harm.
  • Dr Rajan, participated enthusiastically on the following topics
    • Payment Banks / Small Banks and their utility for the Indian Business growth
    • NPCI framework and Payment Systems Revolution
    • Working with FEMA (Mr. Padmanabhan) to resolve difficulties in Money Movements.
  • Other most important advise for Startups were also discussed. To note a few,
    • RBI Governor said India has a decent Capital Chest which provides some Immunity to the Global shocks, however we cannot act in Haste.
    • Today, the need for Inclusive growth were the Unsophisticated Audience can also be carried forward, should be an objective for all innovative solutions.
    • Indian Public Sector institutions should welcome tech-savvy and young entrepreneurs as part of some of their committees.
    • Most importantly RBI can play a convening role for adoption of Innovative Products by Indian Banks.

2015-02-27 10.24.03Conclusion

Overall it is apparent that the INDIAN technology/internet product markets, are in a Golden Moment where Aspirational issues are leading to better RISK appetite among INDIAN Entrepreneurs. It is a new Paradigm where not just startups, but all Institutionals bodies with-in INDIA, need to now collaborate and commit, for supporting each other’s RISKs and Needs. RBI on its part has definitely shown keen interest, and to quote from a fine statement made by Girish, Dr. Rajan, believes that RBI interventions may arrive late, but they will definitely be latest. The Entrepreneur hence must be patient and not act in HASTE.

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How We Got The IT Minister Excited About Indian Product Startups & Made Him Our Spokesperson #UnleashTheEnergy

A behind the scenes account of how a showcase of 11 disruptive startups was put together in just 100 hours!

If you’re reading this, I’m sure  you are a part of the Indian product startup community in one way or the other. And unless you were living under a rock (which is fine, if you were busy hacking away or traveling to sell your product), you wouldn’t have missed that our Hon. IT Minister, Ravi Shankar Prasad was in Bangalore on Tuesday meeting with the product startup community. iSPIRT hosted  the “Conclave for India as Product Nation #1″, an open dialogue between the Product industry and the IT Minister.

What made it all the more special was that the he was the first IT Minister to meet with startups and also that he first met with the startups first before meeting officials from his ministry! The Minister met with the industry leaders, gave a patient hearing to the needs of the product startups and also saw presentations from 11 disruptive startups.

And here’s what the minister had to say after meeting with the startups!

So how did we pull this off? And what if I told you that it was all put together in 100 hours. We ourselves cannot quite understand how everything fell into place! But as Sharad often says, when a bunch of passionate volunteers come together towards a common cause, magic just happens. At iSPIRT, we take our volunteering quite seriously. No wonder then, that we actually have open sourced our volunteer model through a whitepaper to help other communities benefit from it!

 

A text message from Rajan on Saturday morning got me involved. Could we get on a call, he asked. There’s an iSPIRT event scheduled on Tuesday and some help was needed. We spoke and I got to know that there’s an interaction with the IT Minister scheduled on the coming Tuesday. As part of the interaction, we needed to put together a showcase of disruptive product startups to help the Minister get a sense of the kind of impactful work being done and the opportunities ahead. There was list of companies drawn from across various segments and stages, with whom we’d need to connect and get their availability for the event on Tuesday. Tapping into our network of volunteers (many of whom are themselves startup founders and industry leaders), we gathered the contact details of these companies and started reaching out to the companies. These were companies spread across the country and we checked with their founders if they’d be available to present. Based on the availability of teams and the some intense discussion and debate among the Program Managers for the showcase, a short list of the companies presenting on stage was drawn up. The thought process behind the selection of companies was to give the Minister a good view of the breadth (sectors where product startups are making an impact), the depth (companies that have achieved global market/tech leadership) and how far they can grow with sound support from the ecosystem, which includes the government as well. We were immensely privileged to have Mr. Mohandas Pai spare his valuable time for multiple meetings through the whole process and share his inputs on what kind of stories would make the maximum impact.

Product Leaders with the IT MinisterArriving at the shortlist was surely a good beginning. They say well begun is half done. But the tougher half lay ahead! We were already at Monday morning, and within the next 24 hours we had prep up the presenters. Each of the companies were to have a short, crisp presentation with the key points to be covered in under 4 minutes! Shekhar went about this with the precision of a toolmaker, thoroughness of a scientist and the strictness of a school teacher! From putting together notes on what points to cover, iterating multiple times with the presenting companies on their presentations over a sleepless night, to conducting the actual showcase in front of the minister, Shekhar was always on.

(That’s me on the left  trying to get the slides up!)

The event received some very good coverage in the media. Below are some links:

Here’s hoping that achchhe din are indeed ahead for the Indian software product industry!

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Innovation and User experience are two areas where CIOs are willing to look at new things: Highlights of #InTech50 2014: Day 2

This post covers the highlights of day 2 of InTech50 2014.  The highlights of day 1 are here.

Before getting into the highlights of the pitches of the 50 companies, here are some important points from the expert talks and panel discussions.

View from the VCs:

Rob Heiman, Alok Goyal, Sandeep Singhal and Tim Goddard gave practical tips to the entrepreneurs.  Some highlights:IMG_3032

Quality of the team trumps everything else. Everything else – product, technology etc. are not as important as the team. In a startup journey, the product will change, technologies will change and pivots will happen. Hence the quality of the team is paramount to make corrections along the course.

The team has to be focused on one thing and believe in what they are doing.

VCs get tons of unsolicited mail. While they try not to miss any of them – it is better to go through a warm introduction through some common person. Otherwise, getting together will be difficult.

View from the CIOs

Chris Hjelm, Dawn Page, Jay Jayaraman, Damn Frost discussed their view of startups and what startups should consider when engaging with large enterprises.

  • Startups need to understand the business needs of the enterprises.
  • The startup’s product should solve their business problem.
  • Be relevant to their needs. For example, Mobile Security is a big pain point – and they will be very willing to anyone who has a good solution for them.
  • Don’t talk jargon to CIOs – cloud, unstructured data etc. do not excite them. That is not relevant to them. Talk to them on how you can solve their problems.
  • CIOs get tons of emails – identifying a good startup is like finding a needle in a haystack. Word of mouth is a very good medium as CIOs are very well connected with each other.
  • Be realistic about what you can and cannot do.  If a small startup promises to solve world hunger, credibility will be at risk and it can adversely affect the next steps.
  • Do your research on the CIO’s company, their technology choices and current technology investments. Most of the time, this information is freely available. Try to experience the business the CIO’s company is in and then explain to them how your solution fits into their scenario.
  • CIO’s are also looking at the business model of the startups to see if they are going to be long term players.
  • Innovation and User experience are two areas where CIOs are willing to look at new things.
  • One of the big challenges for large companies to work with small companies is scale. Usually, smaller companies do not have the resources to handle requests from a large company.
  • A good and respectable CIO has a lot of say in the company. So it is good to go through the CIO. At the same time, the business group should be excited about your solution so they can back the CIO’s decision.
  • For large companies – data is their most valuable asset. Non-essential data can be put on cloud, but the essential data has to remain on premise e.g. customer data, financial data, as that is very sensitive information.

IMG_3080

Rapid Fire Pitches

The 50 InTech companies chosen to present in the rapid-fire pitch were selected out of the 200 applications.  Each jury member independently scored all the applicants, and the top 50 were chosen.

The InTech50 companies are of different sizes and operate in varied domains. While some of them are leaders in their space and mentioned in Gartner’s magic quadrants, some are pre-funded startups with just a handful of customers.

Most of the companies have a global customer base.  Some of the companies have customers from more than 100 countries.

The 50 companies were categorized broadly into:

  • Experience and Engagement Management
  • HR – Recruitment, Survey, Talent Management
  • BI/Analytics/Social Analytics
  • E-Commerce
  • IT Security
  • IT Services Development

IMG_3063Each company got exactly five minutes to present their product in a rapid fire pitch. Thanks to the excellent planning and execution by Manjunath Gowda of I7 Networks, it was all smoothly executed and on-schedule.

You can learn more about these 50 companies in the InTech50 Booklet.

Awards

Five awards were given at the end of the day under the following categories.

  • Most Scalable Idea – Zipdial
  • Most Original Idea – Uniken
  • Best Value Proposition – Linguanext
  • Best Pitch – Unmetric
  • Most Popular Company – Sapience/TouchMagix

IMG_3042

Benefits to InTech50 Companies

In addition to the great learning from the expert talks and panel discussions, several companies got very good feedback from the CIOs on their product and many got good leads to pursue.   Overall, all the participants found InTech50 very valuable and were extremely grateful to iSPIRT for providing this platform.

Vasanth Kumar, Co-founder and COO of Sheild Square, said that  they got two “proof of concept” (POC) engagements at the conference.

Manjunath Gowda, CEO of I7 Networks also got two POCs and quite a few leads.

Satya Padmanabham from Zapstitch said he got to learn a lot from other companies as well about the different business models and it was a great exposure overall.

Varun Sharma from iViz security said they got good response from CIOs as well as other InTech50 award winning companies.   And it was a great platform to network.

Next InTech 50 is on April 15th and 16th 2015 at Bangalore.  Mark your calendars and be there!

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Uniken: Delivering Secure Digital Experience

Uniken has developed a path breaking Secure Digital Platform, REL-ID™ – which delivers ubiquitous, rich multi-channel digital experience with military grade security to the customers, employees and partners of an enterprise. Uniken was founded by Sanjay Deshpande, Prakash Salvi, Nanjundeashwar Ganapathy, and Nilesh Dhande in 2003 in Boston, with the goal of setting up a world class innovation center. Uniken today boasts of 1M+ users on its platform. 

Introduction

Network communication is increasingly becoming more vulnerable to attacks. Most such attacks attempt to steal your personal details, card details (credit card or debit card), and various other information that can be put to malicious use, mostly to steal money. Whether it is Target, JPMorgan  or banks that don’t wish to be named (obviously), our information is never safe enough.

Uniken1

These attacks target one or more of these elements in the network:

  1. Network
  2. System
  3. Application

Network

There are 2 kinds of network that we use. Internet is the ubiquitous network that allows us to connect to rest of the world. Intranet is the company-wide network that allows us to connect with rest of the employees in our organization. Security hazards in both these networks are slightly different

Internet

Internet relies on open standards and some special servers like DNS (to find the IP address from the server name) and routers (devices that keep the route map of entire Internet, sending network packets from a source towards the destination). They control the way network communications occur; compromising these special servers can compromise Internet (or a large part of it).

Intranet

Intranet normally assumes that all the nodes in the network are trustworthy, and it sends traffic to every node in the network so that the intended recipient can take it while others discard it. This poses a big threat if one of the machines is compromised; controlling one machine is enough for the attacker to control the network.

With cloud services (using Internet services to replace Intranet services) becoming more prevalent in organizations, the line between intranet and internet keeps blurring.

System

Communication happens between two systems on any network. If one of the systems (either sender or receiver) is controlled by a hacker, even a secure network cannot protect you from attack and theft. Malware and viruses are the primary ways systems get compromised, which can then take over a communication link or mislead your system into thinking it is communicating with X while real communication is happening with Y (X is real bank site, Y is fake site, stealing your bank customer id/username and password).

Application

A network and the system may be safe, but if the application you are using to do the communication (say the browser, or a Torrent application downloaded from Internet) is compromised, you are exposed to attack and theft. Given the prevalence of web applications, Browsers are increasingly becoming target of attacks. With the plug-in/add-in model that all browsers support, it is becoming easier for attackers to compromise the browser and thereby compromising the communication.

Securing the network must mean securing each of these elements of the network communication. This is what Uniken attempts to do for its customers.

Uniken Advantage

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Uniken has developed a path breaking Secure Digital Platform, REL-ID™ – which delivers ubiquitous, rich multi-channel digital experience with military grade security to the customers, employees and partners of an enterprise. Through REL-ID, the end users enjoy a rich and secure digital experience across devices (Mobiles, Tablets, Laptops and Desktops) and platforms (Windows, Mac OS, Android, iOS and Windows Phone).

Currently, over a million end users, employees and partners of very large enterprises rely on REL-ID for a seamless and secure digital experience. These enterprises have witnessed online fraud being reduced up to 100%.

So what is REL-ID (Relative Identity)? In REL-ID communication, identity of a system is dependent on the other system it is communicating with. For example, if A and B need to communicate with each other, A’s identity is established relative to B, and B is identified relative to A (hence the name Relative Identity) – this identity is relevant only for A-B communication. Such an identity is established when A or B express interest in communicating with each other, thus creating a mutually authenticated channel for communication.

The Uniken Product

Through REL-ID, Uniken offers a unique and scalable way to create a secure private network. This is achieved through 3 sub-systems that Uniken deploys for its clients – REL-ID Apps, REL-ID Network, and REL-ID Platform.

REL-ID Apps

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A REL-ID App is the client application that is responsible for providing a secure way to communicate to other clients or to the server. It serves 2 purposes in the REL-ID eco-system:

  1. Provide consistent experience to users in all device and OS configurations
  2. Provide a secure way to connect the communicating end points (client-client or client-server)

A REL-ID App has 2 parts:

  • App Viewer – A native container of the application that is implemented differently for different platforms and abstracts the device-specificity. It enables creation of hybrid apps that use HTML/ HTML5 and Javascript for user interface and the APIs for accessing device specific functionality for security
  • HTML5 app – A standard application (HTML5, JavaScript) that is hosted within the App Viewer

Given that they are hosted inside the App Viewer, these apps provide consistent experience running on all devices (desktops, laptops, tablets and mobiles) and all operating systems (Windows, MacOS, iOS, Android) thereby providing excellent customer experience.

For example, if a customer of a bank (who is a Uniken Client) has to avail of netbanking, customer will install a REL-ID app that allows netbanking, and transact through it. This app can be installed on any device.

REL-ID Network

As mentioned before, the REL-ID platform secures the network by creating secure point-to-point (application to application tunnel) connection between sender and receiver. Usually, such a secure connectivity is achieved through the use of VPN (Virtual Private Network) which is hard, costly to manage and deploy at a large scale in such point to point configuration. Within REL-ID, this is achieved without using VPN, using their patented technology.

Continuing with the above example, if the bank employee wishes to check his official mail from home using Outlook (an application that is not a REL-ID App), she can launch Outlook securely through the App Viewer and App Viewer will provide a secure connection to the Exchange Server hosted by the bank. The employee doesn’t need to use complicated procedures like RSA Token in order to achieve this.

REL-ID Platform

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REL-ID Platform controls the policies, permissions and access management and authentication technologies. It ensures that REL-ID Apps and data is accessible only to authorized users through registered devices. It also hosts a REL-ID Store which is a library of pre-defined REL-ID Apps ready to be deployed through App Viewer.

Differentiators

Uniken differentiates its offering in 3 areas:

  1. Patented Military Grade Secure REL-ID Private Network – Supports Mutual and Multi-factor authentication, and state of the art App-to-App tunneling technology, enabling VPN-Less remote secure access through minimal infrastructure requirement. It creates a secure and private closed digital ecosystem, accessible to only authorized users and devices. Enabling this through VPN is a much more complex affair and impossible to be rolled out to large user base like retail banking customers
  2. Compelling Secure Digital Experience – Normally, highly secure applications/systems have meant poor usability (because of restrictions placed and the focus on non-functional goal like Security). However, Uniken has focused on making its apps highly usable in addition to highly secure.
  3. Quick Apps Framework – REL-ID Digital Platform comes with inbuilt secure private app store. These Apps are available not only on the Mobile Platforms (phones/tablets) but also on the desktops/laptops.

 

Development Process

Team

Overall product development + R&D team size is more than 80, with most of their core technology stack built in C/C++, with operating system and network programming skills. They also have a team for embedded systems, who work on creating special purpose secure appliances and devices. Apps are developed in standard HTML5 technologies.

They also have a Product Management team that works closely with the sales/marketing teams and the technology R&D and Product Development teams.

Process

Developing a security product doesn’t require a drastically different product development process or tools. They operate in an iterative 3-day development cycle.

One of the interesting aspect of their development approach (and which is different than other classes of software) is to create monolithic components rather than modular components (which goes against standard design principles of software development). This is to avoid creating multiple points of failure, which is critical to avoid from security perspective.

The features that are specific to the customers are built by separate customization teams. Customizations, when required, are small changes on top of the pre-built apps in the system, and can be typically done in a 7-day rapid development cycle. These are later analyzed (every month) and brought back in to the main product development roadmap if the sales/marketing team justifies doing so.

Even as a security product, usability is a very important aspect of their development process, performance is close second.

Market

Their target segment includes banking, insurance and defense, with the largest set of current customers coming from Banking, including one of the largest Public Sector banks in India.

Over past 2 years, REL-ID has been rolled out to over 1 million users and the count is rapidly growing.
REL-ID is being seen as the next generation security technology in the most difficult to penetrate security market of Israel. This technology has also been appreciated by Indian Defense & Navy where Uniken is supporting them in their security related requirements.

The information security market is projected to reach $67 billion (Rs 4.1 lakh crore) in 2013 and grow to $95 billion (Rs 5.9 lakh crore) by 2017, according to research firm Gartner.

On the security front, there are various players like Symantec, RSA, Vasco and on the network and virtualization technologies front, Cisco and Citrix. On digital experience front, Backbase and Adobe offer similar products.

However, none of these are scalable and unified/holistic to offer a secure digital platform especially when it comes to delivering secure digital experiences to consumers.

Roadmap

Their product suite is now fairly complete in terms of features and functionality. Over next 12-18 months, they are focusing on a few key areas:

  1. Make offering more broad across BFSI
  2. Go deep in India – Penetrate further in India (BFSI, Defense)
  3. Strategic expansion in other geographies – Execute opportunities in Israel (to build credibility by competing with other security companies in Israel), initiate penetration efforts in the US market.

As they expand, the key challenges are to manage the marketing and PR, and identifying the right partners in each of these markets.

The Road Ahead

Uniken has a vision that there will be a very large number of private networks in the world (built on top of public internet) using their technology, one for each group of people who want to communicate privately and securely with each other. In a way, this is counter to what Internet stands for (openness), but given the security and privacy issues mushrooming all over, this is a laudable vision. To be clear, this is very disruptive too: there are very large companies out there whose business models depend on the fact that they can ‘see’ the traffic generated through individual systems, be it a system in an organization, at home, on the road, in hospital, or anywhere else (think digital advertising, personalized search, etc.). These models will cease to exist (or have to be significantly rewired) if the vision of secure private networks come true.

Uniken is taking small but confident steps towards that vision. In next 12-18 months, they intend to have 5 million users on their system (from 1M currently). They are confident about their model of building in India and selling to the world, and their experience working with Indian PSUs (Banks, defense) has been great. Their global marketing efforts are underway, and they are establishing themselves as a potent force in the home of security products – Israel.

It is great to see hard-core technology product being made in India and we wish them all the best as they penetrate US and other big markets of the world.

 

 

 

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First 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 first set of 10 selected products from over 200 nominations.

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

  •  99tests is a Crowd sourced Testing Marketplace with over 6500 testers from over 20 countries. Software product owners can get their applications tested on different versions of web browsers and various mobile devices to find critical bugs.
  • Cerebra (patent pending), a product from Flutura Solutions is a Machine-to-Machine Big Data Analytics platform that has the capability to unlock signals embedded within cryptic machine logs.
  • CoCubes is India’s largest assessment and campus hiring platform. The company works with 450+ corporate for hiring that provide greater control and transparency, while assisting institutional clients measure and improve employability and helping students move ahead on their career path.
  • Datonis (TM) is a platform from Altizon which helps get any device connected to the internet, manage these connected devices and drive data related to their performance and usage to a cloud based data aggregation and analytical engine to glean operational and consumer insight.
  • Freshdesk is a leading SaaS based customer support software that has more than 16,000 Support Teams across the world using it to deliver exceptional customer service. Freshdesk allows businesses to support customers through email, Twitter, Facebook, chat, phone, forums and other channels.
  • Bizosys’ HSearch is an award winning Hadoop based search and analytics engine to handle several terabytes of data. HSearch has been deployed by clients in Telecom infrastructure, Pharmaceutical R&D, Energy management, online retail, financial analytics industries with the core search engine available as open source.
  • Uniken has developed a path breaking Secure Digital Platform, REL-IDTM – which delivers ubiquitous, rich multi-channel digital experience with military grade security to the customers, employees and partners of an enterprise. Through REL-ID, the end users enjoy a rich and secure digital experience across devices and platforms.
  • Whatfix is a solution for creating interactive support faqs, training and product tours. With Whatfix anyone can create such interactive guides with just a few clicks and integrate them with products, applications & websites.
  • WhistleTalk is a SaaS based referral hiring solution that allows companies to leverage the social network of all their current employees, reach out to their friends and hire them. This unique approach helps organisations to supercharge their referral hiring.
  • ZipDial is a pioneering Mobile Marketing & Analytics platform for emerging markets. Marketers and advertisers utilize ZipDial to transform their brand campaigns into highly interactive and viral user experiences, while building a loyal customer base.

Moving Ahead:  As the evaluation process is still underway, we will announce names of the subsequent finalists as we go along. So stay tuned and share your comments about these innovative companies.