Indian Startups Blog

As I promised, here is the blog regarding my experiences being part of the NASSCOM delegation to the Software 2008 and the INTEROP Trade fair and then followed up with the Bay Area visit.

We all arrived on the Monday (April 28th) at Vegas and got ourselves registered for the event. We (S7 Software) were one of the exhibitors in the NASSCOM booth but there were two more on April 29th and three others on the 30th. This time around Software 2008 had merged with INTEROP which had around 500 exhibitors and another 50 or so from the Software 2008. From my experience it was a huge trade fair with many IT or otherwise decision makers attending the same. The way it was setup this time I got a feeling that somewhere SW2008 lost the track and most attendees turned out for INTEROP and SW2008 looked like a poor cousin.

There were also many seminars, keynote sessions and conferences and some of them were very good and were focused towards IT services. There were many good ones but were running on a parallel track and somehow I felt that the merger of SW2008 and INTEROP happened in the later stages than early stages and hence so much of confusion and parallel track happened and I assume most of these issues will be sorted out in the next happening. Nevertheless, one session which stood out from all others was the opening keynote session by CK Prahalad about his book and his view about the “The new age of Innovation” and I thought it was excellent.

We also spent lot of time on the INTEROP floor for business networking and it wasn’t bad either and in the end we felt we spent less time in the conference and one more day would have been great. There were many biggies in the INTEROP including the likes of Microsoft, Foundry, Netgear, Cisco etc but feeling is again that INTEROP is more on the hardware level and I wonder why INTEROP cannot be software too (we provide Software INTEROP solutions and so does Microsoft). Software 2008 too had some great clients such as HCL, Ramco, TCS, Collabera

Overall I was very happy about the event and the kind of leads we were able to generate and kind of info (strategy, market, trends etc) we were able to gather. Infact we went ahead and booked a booth/stall for ourselves for the next year event which is also going to happen in Las Vegas. Also SW2009 is going to be well integrated with INTEROP than this year event for sure.

All of the delegates left to Bay Area on Wednesday for a two day hectic schedule on Thu and Fri. As planned we all met on Thu am in the Comfort inn at Mountain View and then the best thing is we all left in a bus to SD Forum. “Bus” was a great way of making us all mix well and this is when I thought if we had this Bus thing going even before the Vegas event. In SD forum office we had few sessions on what is going on in San Jose and also what are the factors we should look into if we are opening up an office in US specifically in the San Jose Area including the legal issues, banking, VC info, infrastructure rentals and incubator information etc. All these information will be critical when you want to enter the US market. I felt SDforum is a great place to start with and they will network with all related agencies and people as the need arises.

Then we attended NetApp, Google, SUN, & Microsoft offices over the two days. For NetApps, the engineering manager turned up and we were surprised by the amount of India specific knowledge he has (interestingly one of the conference rooms is named “Bangalore” and I saw directions for this Bangalore everywhere) and was a very good session overall. We were bit disappointed over the SUN’s visit as it looked like a museum visit but had an opportunity of seeing all the new hardware that Sun is investing in. Google visit was interesting one as we not only got an opportunity to visit the famous Googleplex but we had to sign an NDA before we set foot in. We had one of the Indian origins employee who happens to be engineering director discussing what makes Google tick and what are the plans and vision they have for the future. The whole Googleplex looked like a college campus and was a great visual treat. The Microsoft office in the bay area was little different but was fortunate enough to have the Corporate VP giving us a presentation which shared MS perspective as what it is currently focussed on and also talked about the trends, focus areas and the support that they can offer to companies. Some of us were thrilled to get attention from MS and getting our queries answered.

On Thursday evening we attended the SIPA (Silicon Valley Indian professionals Association) panel discussion about “The next generation IT services” and I was fortunate enough to be part of the panel members and more fortunate to have distinguished Persistent CEO Anand Deshpande (who was leading the delegation on the behalf of NASSCOM emerging companies forum) and I was amazed at knowledge and hold he processes about the market and software in specific. I was fortunate enough is an understated statement. There were 40 to 45 Indians from the Silicon Valley, lot of the participants were budding entrepreneurs. We also had a very good panel discussion. The session was moderated by Craig who is an ex-HP person and was responsible for lot of work at HP India. Anand also talked about NASSCOM and its activities. The session ended at around 9pm after which we all had dinner together. We had lot of very interesting questions coming from the audience including should we move back to India and what is the right time frame to do so and how is Indian economy doing etc. Overall it was a great panel discussion and surely a great experience to cherish.

We also had panel discussion about the topic “Critical Success factors in entering the US Market ” and workshop on “How to market and Network like a local in the Silicon Valley”. The panel had an investor, a speaker from Deloitte, Senior Director from Sun and a successful entrepreneur. Susan (of SD Forum) raised some good questions as to what all companies should look for before entering the US market, how does one go about getting his first customer and basically doing business in the valley, some best practices were shared by speakers and the opportunities that valley offered. Lot of emphasis was laid on the eco-system that the people in the valley provided for start-ups. Some questions were raised at the end of the session. Matt from Sun Microsystems shared some good insights. The panel discussion was very informative and all these will be very helpful for us going forward as we grow and scale. The workshop was very interesting one and 4 different trainers talked about the cultural aspects and what companies should lay emphasis on.

We ended the delegation trip on Friday night with an informal meeting with TiE members who came to meet the members of the delegation. The event was sponsored by a law firm Orric. This was a pure networking session. It was a a good unwinding session for the delegates and an opportunity to meet with TiE members and some investors. Later in the night all delegates met to collect feedback from the delegation members and later we bid good byes with a promise to meet often and keep in touch.

Overall it was a very successful delegation, very well planned and moreover very well executed I felt. A big part of the success goes to Avinash (from NASSCOM) for organizing and executing such an event. I also like to take this opportunity to thank Anand Deshpande, co-founder and CEO of Persistent, who was leading the NASSCOM delegation of emerging companies. His time, and his experience added lot of glitter to this delegation trip and I am very fortunate to be with him during the delegation days. I hope NASSCOM comes forward with more
such delegation visits hopefully to Europe, and Australia too.

Post Contributed by Manjunath M Gowda, CEO – S7 Solutions

It was a strange coincidence indeed. We at S7 Software had heard the importance of attending software 2008 (especially for SMEs like us from India) through our advisors and we had also learnt about the Interop 2008 which is to be jointly held with software2008 which is also of prime importance as “interops” is one of the offshoot focus area of software migration which is our main focus area. We would have loved to set up a booth but we worked out the numbers and proved to be bit expensive at this stage and hence registered as just attendees and made all travel arrangements and I get this email from NASSCOM about helping SMEs like us to setup booth in Software 2008 and at a reasonable cost – what a god send email for us.

We are very happy to be part of software2008 under the aegis of NASSCOM and we are hoping that we will have a good marketing stint over there. Some of the companies from the delegation are exhibiting at Stall 3220. A detailed list is available at the Software 2008 website.
I am very happy about the proposed NASSCOM’s bay area networking event. Thanks to NASSCOM things are going so far as planned. Me as pre-planned I will be leaving much earlier to US to our US office which is in Redmond, WA and then I will be flying to Las Vegas on 27th to catch up with interops as it opens a day before Software2008 and 29th and 30th it will software 2008 all the way and May 1st and 2nd it will be the bay area networking event and then off to Redmond again and back to India. I am also excited to know that NASSCOM has partnered with SDforum & SIPA for the bay area networking events.

My agenda and expectations are pretty clear, hope to spread the S7 Software existence to all over there, attend few important keynote sessions and also few sessions involving our technology market while I am there and hopefully some good business networking in the bay area. Will surely write about my experience once I am done with this delegation, keep tuned.

Post Contributed by Manjunath M Gowda, S7 Software