Sekar Vembu is a serial entrepreneur with over 11 years of experience in the IT industry. Ask Vembu what made him start his own venture, and he'd retort that it's difficult for him to pin point any particular reason for starting his own venture. But for sure, he says, it was not an idea for a product or a solution that prompted him to start his own company.
Articulating his reasons, he explains, "It's just an internal urge along with an inborn rebellious streak, which makes it difficult for me to fit into an existing organizational culture, especially defined by someone else. So, the urge is to be your own boss and define your own rules and play the game the way you want it played."
But he quickly adds, "I believe most entrepreneurs would fall into this category. But also that may be the reason most entrepreneurs don't succeed in a big way either."
Vembu holds a bachelors degree in Mechanical Engineering and a masters in Operations Research -- both from IIT-Madras. He was the co-founder, the CTO, and a business unit head of AdventNet, a player in the network management domain, albeit better known these days for the Zoho suite of products. He had helped the company grow to a 300 people organization -- without raising any venture capital funding.
Vembu has a slew of achievements to his credit. After AdventNet, he founded SwissSQL -- a database migration solution that helps save over 90% of the migration effort and over 80% of the costs typically involved in database migration projects. SwissSQL was later acquired by AdventNet in 2004.
Thereafter, he went ahead with his own venture, Vembu Technologies, in June 2004. His role in bringing Vembu to its current position is remarkable.
Before venturing on in his own, Vembu says, he didn't make any analysis of the market conditions. Infact, the whole idea was to start a company and later on figure out what to do -- rather than figure out a product idea and then start a company. Take the plunge and figure out something, is what Vembu believes.
After taking the plunge, he went ahead with the research and came up with a product based on the gaps he saw in a particular domain. However, he says, "It's a different matter that the market segment we are focusing now is quite different from what we thought we would focus on when I came up with the product idea."
Irrespective of the market conditions, he just went ahead and did what he thought would succeed. It was then he learnt and redefined his product and market focus to what had the best chance of succeeding.
As for the problems faced by such initiatives in India, he says, he would list the top 3 issues, which in his opinion, are usually faced by software product companies in India:
(1) The lack of big vibrant domestic hi-tech market: It's always easier for any company to focus initially on the domestic market. But when it comes to hi-tech software products, the domestic market, especially the emerging market segment, is still in its infancy. This actually makes it hard for the software product company to get off the ground quickly without much upfront investment.
(2) Lack of access to experienced talent pool: Usually talented and ambitious people try to move out of India for various reasons. Furthermore, lack of experienced talent pool, especially people with software product management and product marketing experience, is a significant hindrance for entrepreneurship to blossom.
(3) Lack of easy access to seed capital in entrepreneur friendly terms.
For Vembu, starting his venture wasn't a cake walk. He had to face initial hiccups, like when he founded SwissSQL, he started with a very small personal investment, to the tune of Rs 5 or 6 lakh. Although, within a year he released the product and started generating revenues, yet he wasn't able to aggressively market the product without some significant upfront investment. This led him to sell his first product including its Intellectual Property to another bigger business
But this didn't move Vembu from fulfilling his other ventures. Infact, he went ahead developing another product in a different domain using the money he had made from the old product as a seed investment. And this is how he started Vembu Technologies.
Finding the right people with right attitude was an earliest challenge for him. In India, he believes, it's difficult to attract young talented people to join a startup -- given the fact that you are competing for talent with the well known services companies. But, lady luck being with him, most of the people he has hired or partnered with are his friends or have come through references from friends. And this has worked out very well.
Looking back at the initial days, Vembu proudly says, "They had initially started with 4 people, and now have about 50 people."
He mentions that his being an IT product company, it leverages technology across whatever they do -- be it managing the software development or automating most of their business processes. Since their business model is geared toward working with a large number of small regional service providers, using IT to automate and manage their interactions with their partners is extremely crucial for them to scale their business.
The company, Vembu Technologies, is focused on the online remote backup domain. Its product is called Vembu StoreGrid. The current model enables regional service providers across the world to provide online backup services to SMBs using StoreGrid.
Elucidating on the future plans, Vembu reveals, that the company's growth is about 300% in calendar year 2007, as compared to 2006. They expect to grow by at least 250% in calendar year 2008. Currently, about 500 service providers across the globe offer online backup services -- powered by StoreGrid.
In addition, the company plans to integrate StoreGrid with storage utility services -- like Amazon S3, etc. This will enable service providers to offer online backup services with very minimal investment and also minimize the operational cost of managing such a service. In the longer term, it plans to develop other products, in the storage domain, which are complementary to StoreGrid.
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In continuation to Part 2 of this series "How to Take Your Biz Online and Beyond", Abhishek M. Gupta, VP (Technology) of Lime Spot Technology, in Part 3, discusses how to increase traffic by by "affiliate marketing". Read on...
