Scaling a Technology Company Against Major Competitors: Solix CEO Sai Gundavelli (Part 5)

Sai Gundavelli: From a technology perspective, I always ask the question, “Why Solix?” Why would any customer buy from us? I focused a lot on that. I focused on engineering. That was the first thing from a technology perspective. We wanted to be a price leader. We’ll make it easy for customers to acquire our solution. We provide a subscription-based pricing. We had a perpetual license based pricing. The third was we were focused on happy customers. With every implementation, we try very hard to make them a happy customer.

Sramana Mitra: This sounds very qualitative. I tend to see situations where small companies compete with a lot of competitors especially when they’re competing with competitors with deep pocket channels. One way people do that is by being able to do something that these larger competitors are not able to do. What was that? I’m sure those guys are also saying we provide great support. We provide great user experience. It’s very hard to sell on that message.

Sai Gundavelli: We were constantly challenging ourselves. It took a lot of years for us. Honestly, it wasn’t that easy.

Sramana Mitra: It’s very difficult. When you face these competitors in customer situations, how do you win deals? That’s the best place to understand this. When you’re competing with one product against competitors, how are you winning deals?

Sai Gundavelli: I’ll answer that question in two parts. The biggest thing that happened was Big Data. When we are archiving, we are technically taking EMC storage from an Oracle database. What we did was the moment Big Data came, we used a Big Data enterprise outside repository. That is why the reason why last week, when Gartner came up with their magic quadrant, they put us as a number three from a vision perspective. We even beat HP now.

I would say now we have a huge value proposition. All these CIOs are trying to figure out a use case for Big Data. We were in structured data archiving. Now we are doing enterprise archiving. We can put everything into a Big Data platform. Why? Cheap storage, cheap CPU, and you don’t need to pay the money to order lots of Microsofts. The fundamental thing why big companies are buying our products is that.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Scaling a Technology Company Against Major Competitors: Solix CEO Sai Gundavelli
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