Loading ...Just back from the EoC2 (Emerge out Conclave 2) meet. This time it was in Chennai (the first one was held in Delhi last year) and I could feel a lot more energy and enthusiasm. Chennai NASSCOM unit rocks for sure.
I had a great day. The whole event was blogged and hence I will not reinvent the wheel and cover some of the aspects what I saw or perceived.
Obviously I took the fastest way to get to Chennai from Bangalore – the train :-) I just cannot imagine myself driving an hour to airport and an hour early and then another hour to get to Chennai (even though it is ½ hour air travel, you add the taxi time and the delay and boarding and un-boarding and if you want you can throw in few hours for mal-functioning of the ATC device too) and another hour to get to the hotel – ho Boy train suddenly makes life so fast (& inexpensive too)!!!
The Day started with the “CEO Speak” where KK (KrishnaKumar Natarajan of MindTree) mentioned about some of the programs of NASSCOM especially meant for Emerging Companies such as Emerge 50, Friday 2.0, Cluster Model, the Mentorship and more. He had a comprehensive talk about all the programs and their benefits and was well covered. Sharad Sharma talked about the downturn and how one has to use this situation as market inflections and see what wind is blowing and get the wind behind your back, SMEs need it. You always have to behave like an underdog and try to disrupt the market – time for disruption rather than just following the so called leaders or the big guys of the industry. According to him India market is ready now and enormous evolution has happened to the ecosystem. His four pearls were, think like a disrupter, think and work like a focused company, work up the partnerships and make yourself a safe choice to the clients.
This was followed with the Entrepreneur talk where they talked about how they survived the 2000 bust and still grew the way they are now including some of the bad problems of going to VC.
Next we had our session “Effective Sales Strategies for Emerging Companies” where I was moderating the session and we had Sashi Reddy of FxLabs, Sreedharan of TAKE Solutions and B Hari of OnTrack systems – it was really a great panel and they shared a lot of info which though will be very useful for the upcoming companies. Some of the main takeaways I could recollect were that you have to invest in sales, need to hire good sales people, metrics is very important and has to be measured rigorously, incentive plan has to be good to sales to motivate them, need to hire those who have a fire in the belly rather than those who are already adapted to the big company culture, recognizing the client profile is very important too and your value proposition, differentiation are important too. The session ended with a good difference of opinion about attending the trade conferences as being expensive to someone from the audience to claim that if you plan ahead you get to meet a lot of senior people who otherwise are inaccessible. Overall the session went very well.
Post lunch was little boring I felt with too many power point presentations (sorry I didn’t attend the parallel track and somehow I feel for such small conferences, parallel track is not really practical) and felt little a drag but I appreciated the totally other view from Anil Bhakt who shared his many failed experiences and sort of put us into being cautious. He was not really unsuccessful either but not really a roaring success either and many a times you learn more from such people than from the roaring success people. Some of the things I learnt is that you need to present solutions to what is required then rather than any futuristic or archaic solutions – just won’t work, find that one customer rather than 100s and 1000s and most importantly cash is critical.
The final session from Phaneesh Murthy of Igate was really special. Short but to the point enough to provoke your minds for sure. For me this was the highlight of the day and I had definitely few take aways and I am sure it might play a good role in shaping our firm. (I and Phaneesh were colleagues way back in 1991 and for a short duration, I had barely knew him nevertheless knew him J).
His point was that big companies cannot change the way things working as it will be way to painful and scary and it is SMEs which has to take advantage of this recession and change the way people think, change the operating model, change the business model. The whole IT outsourcing pie in the world in $1.5 Trillion and our Indian IT pie was just $60 billion, making up hardly less than 5% and hence we should worry about how to enlarge the pie rather than worrying about loss of pie due to recession.
He asked entrepreneurs to be unreasonable or learn to be unreasonable if you are not one else might be tough to run companies. He also talked a bit of T&M models and how we in the last 2 decades have not done any innovation and still sticking to the same old model which he likened to “a hair dresser will inform that his rate is $5/hr and you keep paying him until he keeps on cutting your hair” – doesn’t make sense – most things in the world is outcome based and why IT services has to be any different was his argument and his advice is recession is the best time to convert that and SMEs are the best suitable candidates to do it and not big companies.
His speech made many of us sit back and think for sure and also drew curtains for a very well organized, very informative, and thought provoking conclave.
Thanked NASSCOM and left to the Train station to find out that there was a freak accident in the wee hours of the day and thankfully not a serious one and our train wasn’t cancelled either (many were cancelled) and back to Bangalore and to office for yet another day to be a soldier representing an SME and see and find how to win the War and the (downturn) Economy.
Adios for now and more, soon to come!!!
Manjunath M Gowda, S7 Software
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Surely an interesting take on the EoC2 Manju, thanks
Though I couldn’t be present there, but reading your post, gives me a feel of the day, though would have loved to get a bit more on the perspective shared by entrepreneurs.
Cheers,
Paritosh Sharma