‘Better, Faster, Cheaper...’

The days of the first-mover advantage are over, feels Jay Pullur, CEO and
founder of Pramati Technologies, which deals in

enterprise Java applications. What works today–in this age of standards like
J2EE (in Pramati’s case)–are return on

investment and total cost of ownership

Unlike almost every other company in the industry, you seem to have had a
happy time during the slowdown…

That’s a cake that can be cut in many ways–the slowdown was bad for us
too, but it did some good things too. First, it wiped out the competition–from
over 50 players in our space, we are now down to about half-a-dozen. Second, the
slowdown wiped out ‘time to market’ as a value proposition, replaced by
return on investment (RoI) and total cost of ownership (TCO). Third, it wiped
out the concept of the first-mover advantage, where customers would be ‘locked
in’ and cannot move out–that’s because of the emergence of standards–J2EE
in this case.

Pramati’s 3.0 is the first Java app server to meet J2EE certification
1.3 compatibility, passing 15,138 tests, against the 5,000-plus that are needed
for 1.2 compatibility. But many say you may fall victim to the ‘First Great
Idea’ syndrome…

We have known for a long time that for any company to succeed, it has to
learn to live life beyond its first great idea. But we have done more than that
one app server. In the last year, we have set up offices in five Indian cities–Hyderabad,
Chennai, Delhi, Bangalore and Mumbai. In the US, we are going ahead with a
totally indirect model–operating through independent software vendors, who are
all building their solutions on top of the J2EE architecture. We are
collaborating with most product players in the Indian banking space–iFlex,
Polaris, Orbitech (now merged) and Nucleus Software, among others. We are
preparing for the future, having built a solid presence–we have 120 employees
worldwide. While 110 of them are in India, the other 10 are sales and support
staff in the US.

Today, it is the West Asian and East Asian markets, specifically APAC,
which is the ‘hot’ geography for IT companies. But in these countries, it us
services that really makes the difference…

I agree. It is Korea that we have decided on for our Asian hub. Why not
Japan, some ask–simple, it is a tough market to penetrate. And why not China–that’s
easy to penetrate, but there are few paying customers there. Also, Korea is
positioned uniquely, bang between Japan and China. This facilitates a push into
either country–at present, though, we are targeting five markets from here–Hong
Kong, South China, Australia, Singapore and Israel.

As for what we have seen sells well for us, it has to be support–we have
closed many, many deals based on the support that we provide. And since our
technology is a complex one, it is support that is most sought after. But for
us, support comes easy–we have the expertise, and with increasing order size,
we just need to add people.

Rajeev Narayan in New Delhi