Innovating around your needs.
Loading ...The 2nd in the series of NASSCOM Innovation Awards 2008 road show just got over today here at Leela Palace, Bangalore. This is the fifth edition of NASSCOM innovation awards and the quality of the applications have been improving year on year as Rajdeep Sahrawat, VP at NASSCOM noted. Delivering the welcome address to all the presenters, jury and the attendees he highlighted the initiative behind the innovation awards. Post that Ms. Rohini Srivatsav of Boston Consulting Group gave a brief recap of how the Innovation awards took shape from the days of ideation to road shows. I believe it was an very structural process in identifying the positioning for the event, channelizing feedback, bucketising the suggestions and coming up with 4 distinct areas for the awards.
Today’s event is showcasing 6 of the finalists under Market Facing – Business Model & Business Process Innovation. The Royal ball room looks largely occupied with close ~80 or so people attending the event. You can have a look at the jury here. Prof. Phatak joined a bit late into the sessions and additionally Mr. Jawahar Malhotra, CTO Yahoo India R&D had joined.
The sessions have started almost in time. Each of the finalists would get 15 minutes to present and 15 minutes of Q&A.
We have the first company, AppPoint showcasing their product BizAPP Studio, a business process platform for business management solutions. Venki Mutanna, CEO AppPoint is the key presenter. A little brief about the company, AppPoint is a 3 yr old company, 40 people strong right now and based out of Bangalore. They are a product company who are bringing innovation in model driven process management solutions through their service channels which include many giant services companies.
The showcase product of today is BizApp studio. The key distinguishing features of their platform is it is entirely model driven, almost not necessitating any code to integrate varied client software systems. They host a multi client interface which enables the clients to seamlessly scale globally and control operations from varied geographical locations. Their multi site subscription model, virtualization and a patent pending security management system of roles and access are meant to accommodate agile growth when companies grow large and go through mergers & acquisitions.
The key problem around business process that BizApp, which is a 1 year old product serving 7 clients caters to include integration issues related to growth, technology and compliancy regulation.
Case study: A large retail chain in UK which faces issues due to lack of integration between SaaS based CRM and SaaS based insurances client. Thus evolved, Integration as a Service serving the client with a fast response time of 3 weeks, completely model driven. It has reduced claims and additionally saving around $100K savings for the client.
They hope to innovate more around the supplier and distributor network going further.
Q&A sessions did not come out to be impressive as the team seemed to fall short jury’s questions around competition and revenue model which is essentially getting a cut out of the service companies for their efficient Integration platform delivered as a service to their clients.
We next have Drishti Soft presenting their DACX Ameyo, their flagship contact center software which already has around 200 clients across South Asian countries. Ankur, who heads Marketing at Drishti is representing the company. Their key market is emerging countries of South Asia where they have a lot of understanding around the call center processes catering to domestic market. The revenue is license based.
Key business problem facing call centers are around customer experience, retention, effective campaigns. Traditionally most call centers have been adopting their processes around technology that is available. What DACX Ameyo does differently is to enable technology around business processes that suit the clients best.
Their DACX Ameyo platform allows for high level customization for every client in a model driven approach. It also enables integration across multiple channels like chat, SMS, voice based calls etc. The packaging and pricing is also modular for every client depending on their requirements. They are hence able to deliver a higher value for the price paid by their clients. DACX Ameyo has capabilites for automated code generation to build UI, embed rules and monitoring/alert systems very quickly. Its ability to drive policy based campaigns have had immense effect on conversion rates for their clients which in turn encourages them to grow in scale.
Case study: MOSL. At around ~1000 ports at the largest brokerage/advisory in India across their 3 different departments with each CSR managing 3-4 ports.
The presentation had to winded up as time was up. Q&A session mostly saw questions around scaling and market segment.
Next we have a very interesting company, believe it or not out of India and highly successful in enabling grid computing and remote rendering in the Digital Imaging space.
We have Krishna Prasad from DUX Soft presenting their impressive remote rendering tool SPARX.
DUX is a 2 year old company and already seeing huge business in the digital imaging market capturing 70% of the indian digital image industry.
SPARX can be used over 3 different operating systems: Windows, Linux and Mac. Even behind the scenes SPARX supports heterogenous clustering of nodes running different operating systems which is impressive. SPARX supports leading imaging software in the market like Maya. SPARX is already deployed on Tata CRL, Indian super computer to cater to global needs of rendering.
In effect SPARX enables anyone to remotely benefit from hundreds of computing nodes to execute programs or computations needing high computing cycles within a short period of time. However the key market they serve today is in the Digital Imaging space which is a niche market given the huge commercialization and urgent needs of companies to render graphics. It also has seen 40% yearly growth which opens up a huge market going further too. Additionally the support of multiple imaging software on SPARX is a plus of companies using it as they don’t have to worry about keeping up-to-date with the new softwares coming up in the market.
Though their success is impressive, the highlight was taken away from business process or business model innovation. The only take away being they have take grid computing to the digital imaging industry where it is not cost-effective to afford individually and with a revenue model to bill customers based on usage, it seems a perfect fit for the needs.
SPARX was explained that in the presentation as..
- Any user from any part of the world can login and compute there Image files.
- SPARX support various imaging industry applications
- Small and large organizations can adopt SPARX for peak time computer needs.
- SPARX gives faster business trunaround for clients
- SPARX give smaller revenues but in large volume for DUX.
- SPARX can be loaded on any type of the below
6.1 – set of simply connected network computers
6.2 – Grid/Cluster computing
6.3 – Super computing.
7. The above point is a new business model for any hosted group of servers by any organization. Means the world would have got more than 100′s of hosted services for various industries and SPARX opens a new model of business for all of them.
Q&A session was quite good, with the team’s experience in the digital imaging industry and grid computing. For the more interested here is a video demonstration of SPARX.
All 3 companies in this session really did not highlight or educate the audience around the business innovation they bring into the market. In general people felt it was more of presentation around the technology and product than the business process innovation which was supposed to be the highlight of the session.
We break for coffee and will be joining later with the next 3 companies.
Post Contributed by Jyothirmayee, Hived
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Just to add a note on the observation about cut on service company’s revenue – BizAPP is a platform which enables organization to develop a complete process management infrastructure. A key aspect of a process management infrastructure is to leverage existing investment optimally and to further extend them to address their changing business needs. In this context, BizAPP’s model driven approach to exposing, integrating & extending existing solution is a stepping stone. Once existing solutions are exposed and integrated, organization can model additional processes and solutions leveraging the same platform and not having to invest on new technology or tools.
Being a comprahensive platform, our revenue from BizAPP is not limited to integration service/solution. We are working with certain partners with extensive domain expertise to develop BPM solutions catering to specific industry. We are also working with a few customers of ours to develop solutions addressing their business problem which would later be packaged for other customers in the same industry.
Given the changes we are seeing in terms of technology and business model, as well as the pressure to derive better ROI and reduce TCO, clients would invariably explore options such as the approach enabled by platforms like BizAPP.