Bootstrapping Using Services: Krish Kupathil, CEO, AgreeYa Mobility (Part 7)

Sramana: Right now your product offering is Microsoft-centric. Do you see that remaining your strategic outlook?

Krish Kupathil: We will definitely continue to support and develop around enabling access to Microsoft products. We will also look at other technologies for which we can enable corporate access. We are a startup, and we are more opportunistic. We will look at which companies it makes sense to make work with based on our technology.

Sramana: Aside from the Microsoft productivity suite, what else do you need to enable? Do you need to enable Google?

Krish Kupathil: Yes, and we will do that. We are working on a cloud component of our solution, and we are looking to launch that by the end of this year with telecom operators in Europe. Google is going to be among the other technologies that we enable. There are also new technologies coming out that are being adopted in the market, and we will enable those technologies as well.

Sramana: I am assuming that you are talking about Dropbox?

Krish Kupathil: There are so many communication and collaboration solutions coming up, but, yes, Dropbox is one of them. There are also major solutions like SAP and Oracle that we need to look at.

Sramana: What about collaboration technologies such as WebEx?

Krish Kupathil: Absolutely. WebEx is an interesting technology, and we are in discussions with them.

Sramana: How big is that product opportunity, specifically for collaboration and productivity?

Krish Kupathil: We call it unified collaboration and communication for mobile devices. It is a very large space. I just came back from an overseas trip and I met a bunch of CIOs in Europe and Asia. From their perspective, they see the world divided into three platforms. One is Windows, the second is Linux, and the third is mobile platforms.

What they want of any solution they adopt is universal application. Any solution they adopt should work across all three platforms. Imagine all the enterprises in the world, and all the productivity solutions that exist, and make all of them work on the mobile platform. They don’t want to know that the mobile platform is fragmented. That is the size of the opportunity.

Sramana: What is preventing Microsoft from doing this natively in their Windows 8 phones?

Krish Kupathil: We asked them the same question. The answer was never very clear. What they told us is that they have their Windows 8 platform which they will focus on, and that they will leave integration with other platforms up to a third-party partner.

Sramana: What is the logical makeup of your business?

Krish Kupathil: We have our company spread across the the U.S., China, Korea, India, Poland and Canada. In the mobile space, a lot of stuff gets done in Korea because two of the largest manufacturers are there. On the services side, we need to be physically close to where our customers are.

Sramana: How big is your team?

Krish Kupathil: We are closing in on 400.

Sramana: How is that split between the product business and the service business?

Krish Kupathil: On the product side we have around 60 on the development team. We have a sales and pre-sales team of around 20 people.

Sramana: This has been a very interesting story. I appreciate your time, and thank you for sharing your insights.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Bootstrapping Using Services: Krish Kupathil, CEO, AgreeYa Mobility
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