Scaling a Technology Company Against Major Competitors: Solix CEO Sai Gundavelli (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s switch the questioning. Tell us about how your business has ramped. You started in about 2003 and you’ve, obviously, evolved and maneuvered well strategically. What has been your revenue trajectory? Where are you now? What kind of growth rates are you experiencing?

Sai Gundavelli: For the first five years, we were really struggling. We were trying to build the entire product. We were trying to educate the market. Average typical selling price was about $100,000 to $200,000. Later on, I would say it became around $250,000. With the Big Data product, the deal sizes are north of a million dollars. One deal that we’re signing up right now is about $3 million. >>>

Taking On The Big Guys: Chrome River Co-Founder and COO Dave Terry (Part 5)

Dave Terry: The company had been growing at a really nice growth rate. I think at that point we were in the Inc. 500 list two or three years in a row. We were really funding things out of profits but we had a few investors calling us constantly. We thought that we can keep growing in the self-funded mode, but maybe we should bring in some additional capital. In May of 2012, we decided to take our first round of outside investment. We took $3 million.

Sramana Mitra: What was the revenue at that point?

Dave Terry: We probably shouldn’t say.

Sramana Mitra: If you’re on Inc. 500, that information must have been public.

Dave Terry: Yes. I think we were probably in the order of $5 million to $7 million recurring. >>>

Scaling a Technology Company Against Major Competitors: Solix CEO Sai Gundavelli (Part 6)

Sai Gundavelli: We also did two killer partnerships. One is with a company called Kronos and the other one is with EDT. We made them put OEM on our products. They also had a lot of data that they needed to archive. They’re implementing our product in all their customers. We’re getting all the seeding with this strategic alliance. That’s 6,000 enterprise customers all around the world.

Sramana Mitra: Terrific.

Sai Gundavelli: Then, Big Data really gave us a huge differentiation. Big Data should be part of your enterprise blueprint. The traditional hardware is not going to school. You need Big Data. We position enterprise archiving on Big Data and that gave us a tremendous strategic advantage. We are the only player among all the competition to offer that. Even Informatica, IBM, and HP are struggling to innovate. They can’t act as fast as we can. These two things really helped us.

Sramana Mitra: This is what I’m looking for – the real product positioning angle to see the differentiation. Do you just do archiving or their retrieval capabilities as well? >>>

Scaling an Analytics Services Business to $30 Million: Axtria CEO Jaswinder Chadha (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: This is a US–India model since Helion is involved?

Jaswinder Chadha: Yes. Two-thirds are in India and the rest are in the United States.

Sramana Mitra: Where in India is your operations?

Jaswinder Chadha: In Gurgaon.

Sramana Mitra: What else is interesting in the story that you want to share? >>>

Taking On The Big Guys: Chrome River Co-Founder and COO Dave Terry (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Given that was your analysis of the market, how did you get the venture off the ground? Did you raise money? Did you self-finance?

Dave Terry: It was just Alan and me. Our prior organization was an all licensed in-house model. We knew we wanted to build this entire organization as a SaaS infrastructure. We went out and got a very talented CTO who had experience in working with large, high-transaction volume SaaS operations.

Sramana Mitra: How did you get that person? >>>

Scaling an Analytics Services Business to $30 Million: Axtria CEO Jaswinder Chadha (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What is your model? Do you do services? Do you have products? What’s the business?

Jaswinder Chadha: It’s all of the above but we, primarily, view ourselves as a services company. Even software today is a services business. In some ways, we have an advantage in that we came from building products and delivering services on this platform. Typically, product companies don’t have a strong DNA of delivering services to clients. Fortunately, we do.

We invested a significant amount in building products. We actually have a number of accelerators and platforms that we use to deliver business planning, business analytics, and business process management services to the clients. >>>

Taking On The Big Guys: Chrome River Co-Founder and COO Dave Terry (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me more about what were the circumstances of starting this new company.

Dave Terry: We had a large ERP system for these large law firms. ChromeRiver does expense reporting. We automate the labor-intensive and error-prone workflow process of expense reporting and supplier invoice management. While I was still at Elite, some of our largest customers came to us and said they wanted a robust expense reporting solution. We, just like all ERP systems, had a very shallow module for expense reporting. You could put in your expenses and it routed to someone for approval. Then, it was off for payment. This was 10 years ago.

There were a number of systems that were starting to evolve. Even with all of our robust resources, we decided to partner with another app at that time. We partnered with Extensity. Our main competitor in the ERP space for these large professional services went out and partnered with another company. In the ensuing years, each of those solutions were leapfrogged by another company called Concur. >>>

Scaling an Analytics Services Business to $30 Million: Axtria CEO Jaswinder Chadha (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What about your operations team? Part of the people who were executing on these projects were in India? Is that why you raised money from Bangalore?

Jaswinder Chadha: Yes. Actually, we raised money before we set up our operations in India. We were one of the companies to do data analytics in India. We were the first and the largest data analytics company built out of India.

Sramana Mitra: You raised your first institutional round at about $12 million a year run rate?

Jaswinder Chadha: Correct.

Sramana Mitra: How far did you go before you sold the company?

Jaswinder Chadha: We grew the business to about $50 million in revenues. We sold the company in 2007 to Cognizant. >>>