India, the graveyard of innovative pilots, the place where most product
companies don't survive beyond their first birthday, is now seeing a lot of
corrections in its business models, investment patterns, focus areas and
perhaps, more importantly, the ecosystem. Home-bred product companies are
talking about investing in the distribution system, fuelling demand by making
software affordable and available. Microsoft is doing its bit by providing
innovative companies valuable resources-from exposure to the V-C community to
its technology; and, at times, even marketing help. Recently, it got a bouquet
of companies to pitch in for 20-25 minutes before Dan'L Lewin, corporate vice
president, DPE Division, a mouthpiece to the reset of the V-C community in the
Silicon Valley and someone who holds an annual event called the 'VC summit'.
India found a window when chairman Ravi Venkatesan went over to pitch India last
year, talking about a number of companies who were sort of representatives from
the country. Dataquest catches up with Dan'L and Microsoft India director,
Sheila Gulati to find out more.
Sheila Gulati |
To innovative companies who want to work on the Windows platform, what do
you have to offer? Will you invest in them?
Dan'L Lewin: We are not a venture capital firm and most corporations do
not do direct investment. But we provide all kinds of other resources to the
young, innovative as well as the ISVs. We invest heavily into our partner
programs. By anyone's estimate, our developer programs and our reach-our DPE
division alone, which is a global division, has 1,500 people and very
significant tens and tens of millions of dollars' operating budget that we put
forth to enable and work with partners-all intended at helping them succeed
with customers. Resources would mean marketing, technical resources, training,
their selling efforts in channel, significant architectural guidance, access to
different platform technologies.
How many Indian companies have you reached out to?
Sheila Gulati: In terms of our partner database, there are quite a few
companies we reach out to through our ISV activities. We invite thousands of
people four times a year to speak about different technologies, business trends
and there is a series of technical labs that come out of that. That is quite a
large database in terms of companies and individuals.
India is Innovation | |
Microsoft usually looks The software giant's Enterprise software
|
Telecom/ Mobility
Networking
Innovative Business
Rural and Emerging
|
What is the order of magnitude globally?
Dan'L Lewin: At any given year, we will take a look at a couple of
thousand companies that received venture financing. That's the macro level.
There are about a 100 companies a month that have relevance to our industry and
some meaning for us helping them. It narrows down to about 200 plus per year
that we can, with high integrity, say we help.
What is the rationale behind the 'India is Innovation' campaign?
Sheila Gulati: We are creating a set of marketing materials. This is
something Dan'L's team did globally. They called it 'Innovation Starts
Here', which was a profiling of innovative companies. Ours is called 'India
is Innovation' and so is a profiling of innovative companies coming out of
India. We are going to re-brand India and be the front-end of marketing for
these companies, be it in Silicon Valley or to the community here. It is the
first time we are doing this in such a structured manner. We pitched our partner
ecosystem to venture capitalists in India.
Is Microsoft looking at buying innovative companies discovered through its
emerging business team?
Dan'L Lewin: Sometimes we pay a fair price and buy them. We are a good
acquirer. In the 90s, we brought more companies than any other large tech
company. In this decade also, we are leading in terms of the number of companies
we acquired. But our primary concern and motivation in a world of service
orientation and Web services is that there is more partnering opportunity than
ever because we are going out to the edge of the network and there is a new
market, business opportunity, customer demands. We are a platform company at the
core-our servers, databases, tools, even Office now is a very effective,
programmable asset; Excel is now very powerful in the Office system-things
that can be embedded in other solutions. So we have many more empowering
platform assets available today than we did five years ago and with Web services
and XML related standards in interoperability, our component pieces and parts
can be leveraged by partners. We spend a lot of time with entrepreneurs.
Goutam Das
goutamd@cybermedia.co.in