Been extremely busy with year end closing accounts and new year planning issues. In India our financial year starts on April 1 and end on March 31 and all our planning happens for this financial year; Also lot of my time is taken up for my upcoming US trip (particularly software2008 and interops trade fairs).
We had one of our senior directors visiting Australia on an urgent business consulting about HP's product Transaction Vision; History has it that we worked for this product during its initial design and implementation days during Bristol Era (it is Bristol's product and now it is HP's as Bristol got acquired by HP in Feb 07) and today there are not many experts in those technologies, product and especially none in India or the Asia Pacific rim; guess what now we are the only one now :-) BTW his feedback about Australia and Canberra in particular has been great and he says is a very friendly neighborhood, very beautiful terrain and very sparsely populated. Wish we can grow our business in the Asia Pacific with this as the starting point.
Last week I had been to one of the seminars about Branding in technology industries and the presenter was one of the early employees of one of the big Indian service firm (I don’t want to take names for such word of mouth issues) and she was explaining how she was hired for operations work as it was required for some conformation report and how she took over branding of that company (today it brand is very well known all over the country and the globe) and she shared some very valuable experiences of hers with the founders of the firm. We were surprised when she shared that most founders were many a times decided to fold up or sell and how one of them kept on blocking such moves and how his perseverance paid in the end. She said that many of the innovative ideas of the company came from less known sources and fresh faces but the founders knew which had weight and latched onto them when they perceived their values. Also they were very stingy and every expense was questioned and they got most of the branding with almost no money spent. They basically waited and the external market forces aligned to its strength. I guess the moral is one needs to stick onto their beliefs and generally a time comes when the outside market forces aligns to their strengths and that’s when you make hay and yes perseverance pays especially in entrepreneurship.
Anyway coming back to branding, my personal opinion or definition for branding especially in the high tech industry is creating awareness and value in the place where it matters (for the right audience). We are not FMCG to neither be omnipresent nor involve a multi-million dollar budget for the same. There are many many innovative ways to brand where it hardly involves any expenses.
BTW, had a surprise on Saturday when one of my senior engineers SMS’d be about the nice letter I have written that got printed in the TOI and I was wondering when I wrote but it so happened that in the Business Bistro section there was a nice article about sports and it effects on the techies and we at S7 Software being professionals at cricket wrote back more on what our experiences are but never expected that it will get printed J Anyone interested can see at this link:
http://epaper.timesofindia.com/Repository/ml.asp?Ref=VE9JQkcvMjAwOC8wNC8xMiNBcjAyMzA2&Mode=HTML&Locale=english-skin-custom
More later................
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