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Treasure Hunt

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DQI Bureau
New Update

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.

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       Sheila Gulati

Dan'L Lewin

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. 

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India is Innovation

Microsoft usually looks

at product companies across the board. It organizes thinking around

portfolio spaces-collaboration, mobility, security, enterprise

infrastructure, platform services, gaming etc-at the cluster of

activities from the market perspective and then around how Microsoft as a

company can work with them, and that's typically based on its platforms

again: Is the product company it proposes to work with leveraging SQL

server, for instance? That is where it has a mutual interest.

The software giant's

recently released booklet on innovation features the following companies:

Enterprise software

  • Aurigo Software

  • Beehive Systems

  • Compulink

  • e-Caliber

  • eXensys

  • Geometric Software

  • Mitoken

  • Oat Systems

  • PacSoft Solutions

  • Pinelabs

  • Satnav

  • Skelta Software 



Telecom/ Mobility

  • Adamya Technologies

  • Hellosoft

  • Infozech

  • Jataayu

  • MobiApps

  • Nazara

  • onMobile

  • Subex Systems 



Networking

  • Tejas Networks 



Innovative Business

Models

  • Cranes Software

  • Shaadi.com

  • Tutorvista

Rural and Emerging

markets

  • Acceltree

  • Midas

    Communications

  • Novatium

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

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