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................
Monday, April 14, 2008
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
The Software 2008 Tradeshow at Vegas and more.....
This time around the software 2008 tradeshow (software2008.com) is happening Apr last week in Las Vegas coinciding with dates of Interops Tradeshow and we at S7 Software are very excited as we are participating in both the shows and we are in fact setting up the stall in Software 2008 (under the Aegis of NASSCOM). What we have heard is that it is one of the top trade shows we should be attending but setting up a stall will be really great. This is our first experience in setting such a booth/stall in a ny trade show in the US. I will surely share my experience here once the show is over but I am very excited about it.
It has been 15 years since I had been to Vegas and I wonder what all has changed but I am not so excited to see Vegas or for that matter any part of US. I lived there for 7 years but other than Niagara Falls I dont have not worthy place to mention, I am not much of a pleasure traveller but more of a business traveller. I love to visit those place where there is dough not where I need to pay dough :-)
I will be in Seattle-Redmond area between Apr 23rd to Apr 27th visiting cients in that area and then off to Vegas for the trade fair (28th, 29th and 30th) and then off to Bay Area for 2 days (May 1st and 2nd) to accompany NASSCOM's netwroking event and back to Seattle to meet one of our investors and then back to India. Two week trip and a short one by all standards but still a long one for me.
Back Home, I am very excited about the Tatas buyout of Jaguar and Land Rover from Ford. The comment from BW which said and I quote below was very interesting:
"Could Winston Churchill, or even the current Queen of England, have imagined a half-century ago that a pair of Britain's proudest industrial icons would one day be owned by an Indian company?"
Couple of months back Tata announced the world's cheapest car too, the Tata Nano which probably will cost around $2500 or less. It will be very interesting to see how Tata manages the complete spectrum of cars especially in a market where comptetion is fieres in each segment of the market forget the complete gamut; I will be definitely following this for sure and especially how they continue to manufacture autos in Britian with all those trade union and manufacturing issues which even Ford could not handle.
Another interesting thing I am closely watching the possible (rumors) of takeover of Aztecsoft and it was confirmed by their MD KB Chnadrasekar that Aztecsoft is up for merger and two companies had showed keen interest - one is MindTree and the other is Symphony Services and I assuming all were waiting for this quarter closure (and financial year closure too in India) and dont be surprised if you see some news coming out in couple of weeks and my money is on MindTree acquiring it.
More later; Comments welcome :-)
It has been 15 years since I had been to Vegas and I wonder what all has changed but I am not so excited to see Vegas or for that matter any part of US. I lived there for 7 years but other than Niagara Falls I dont have not worthy place to mention, I am not much of a pleasure traveller but more of a business traveller. I love to visit those place where there is dough not where I need to pay dough :-)
I will be in Seattle-Redmond area between Apr 23rd to Apr 27th visiting cients in that area and then off to Vegas for the trade fair (28th, 29th and 30th) and then off to Bay Area for 2 days (May 1st and 2nd) to accompany NASSCOM's netwroking event and back to Seattle to meet one of our investors and then back to India. Two week trip and a short one by all standards but still a long one for me.
Back Home, I am very excited about the Tatas buyout of Jaguar and Land Rover from Ford. The comment from BW which said and I quote below was very interesting:
"Could Winston Churchill, or even the current Queen of England, have imagined a half-century ago that a pair of Britain's proudest industrial icons would one day be owned by an Indian company?"
Couple of months back Tata announced the world's cheapest car too, the Tata Nano which probably will cost around $2500 or less. It will be very interesting to see how Tata manages the complete spectrum of cars especially in a market where comptetion is fieres in each segment of the market forget the complete gamut; I will be definitely following this for sure and especially how they continue to manufacture autos in Britian with all those trade union and manufacturing issues which even Ford could not handle.
Another interesting thing I am closely watching the possible (rumors) of takeover of Aztecsoft and it was confirmed by their MD KB Chnadrasekar that Aztecsoft is up for merger and two companies had showed keen interest - one is MindTree and the other is Symphony Services and I assuming all were waiting for this quarter closure (and financial year closure too in India) and dont be surprised if you see some news coming out in couple of weeks and my money is on MindTree acquiring it.
More later; Comments welcome :-)
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