Bootstrapping Using Services: Krishna Kumar, CEO of AppOrchid (Part 7)

Sramana: How have you structured your technology to support these various use cases?

Krishna Kumar: Our app building platform lets you build apps quickly for these various conditions. We use an agent-based model. That is a cool way of predicting human response conditions. We are mimicking the human intelligence response to different conditions and using that model in a fast forward basis to come up with a set of analytical dashboards 20 years into the future. That information is being used by planning engineers and management to manage their portfolio in a forward leaning fashion.
This is a light project. It takes a lot of manpower to come up with the ROI. However, what we can say is that we have an implemented project worth $500,000 that we can now take to professional services companies who can replicate that in a factory mode.

Sramana: It sounds like energy might be a sweet spot. You have a lot of domain knowledge and likely some good relationships.

Krishna Kumar: Absolutely, but I don’t want to tie into only that industry. It is a very slow moving industry. The joke in that industry is that the only thing that moves fast are the electrons. It is an incredibly slow market. It was one thing to have smart grid funding but that has now dried up, so things are going to get slower in the green tech space.

Sramana: Is that why you are driving adoption in other verticals such as retail?

Krishna Kumar: Yes. Given my past history with SAP, I saw that life sciences, retail, consumer data, big data and similar areas have proven to be good wins for them.

Sramana: Is this product built on SAP?

Krishna Kumar: It can run on HANA because I have good relationships with SAP but we are not HANA dependent.

Sramana: We help incubate companies on the HANA platform.

Krishna Kumar: There are a lot of big ticket technologies coming into the fray. HANA is one and IBM has Watson. To promote these new technologies, there are a lot of incentives for startups to adopt them. Startups can get paid to develop and application on those platforms.

Sramana: It is a lot faster to build a technology solution when you can leverage other people’s stack.

Krishna Kumar: It’s a lot different. There is marketing power behind it. Companies like SAP and IBM are virtually startups themselves. They have to prove that their technology is still relevant. HANA is new. Watson is new. There is not a lot of proven use cases there either.

Sramana: They are spending huge amounts of money trying to incentivize startups to build on their platform. That is absolutely true.

Krishna Kumar: It is a very interesting time.

Sramana: Great. Thank you for sharing your story. Best of luck as you press forward building your company.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Bootstrapping Using Services: Krishna Kumar, CEO of AppOrchid
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