Roundtable Recap: February 17 – Indian Company Plugs Gap In Google’s Enterprise Solution

For this week’s One Million by One Million roundtable, we started off by announcing a new deal through which the 1M/1M–Persistent Systems partnership has decided to back Indian company OrangeScape.

So the first company I want to discuss today is OrangeScape, before I move on to today’s presenters. OrangeScape positions itself as an Application Platform As A Service (APaaS) provider, and has marquee customers in India, including Unilever, Citibank, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, and Sterlite. They will now be leveraging the 1M/1M–Persistent channel to go to market in the United States.

What caught my attention as I started working with OrangeScape is their proven ability to plug a distinct gap in Google’s enterprise solution. As you know, the Google productivity apps portfolio is getting very good traction within enterprises, and through our Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing series, we’ve heard from various CIOs who are moving from Lotus Notes or Microsoft Exchange to Google’s office suite. One of the primary drivers of the switch is cost. A second is collaboration.

Currently, when enterprises switch to Google’s productivity suite, they still need to make provisions to move the large portfolio of homegrown long-tail productivity apps that have been developed around the previous system – Lotus Notes or Microsoft Exchange. And in comes the Google App Engine as Google’s offering in this context.

Well, it turns out that to port long tail productivity apps to Google’s App Engine is a somewhat cumbersome job and requires a lot of custom development. Building new apps is also not as simple.

Enter OrangeScape.

The long tail apps can easily be ported to or developed on Google App Engine in a third of the time and cost using OrangeScape as an application platform. Voila, the entire productivity suite of an enterprise can become cloud-ready, quickly, efficiently, and cost effectively.

I have long been a champion of Indian product companies, urging entrepreneurs to think beyond labor arbitrage and outsourcing. Today, I am thrilled to see that OrangeScape is emerging as a promising player in the Indian startup firmament, and reaching for global market penetration.

Next, Paul Croskrey with OBM Global pitched the Multi Angular Force Generator (MAFG), an alternative energy startup aiming to provide off-grid power. The MAFG claims to create huge amounts of horsepower and torque, enough to drive the largest generators made today. The MAFG Thermal Reactors utilize thermal storage tanks heated to high temperatures to produce steam allowing it to run a variety to operations ranging from waste purification to running steam turbines making electricity.

Paul says that he wants commercial operations to use this off-grid power supply, and help companies like Walmart save costs. Walmart, in fact, is interested in testing the module at one of their warehouses.

Paul’s bottleneck, however, is validation. He needs knowledgeable and credible people to validate that the technology for which OBM already has issued patents works, or at least has the potential to work. No investment is possible without that validation, whether it is government grants (and there are quite a lot of those available for clean energy projects) or angel or venture capital. It is not possible for financial investors to gauge the viability of this technology without some help from scientists and researchers.

I advised Paul to find a scientist with enough credibility in this field and invite him or her as a cofounder/chief scientist. This is an essential step that will be necessary for Paul to take. It is squarely in his critical path, blocking all sorts of financing options, and unfortunately, he cannot really make progress with this venture without some external financing. It’s simply a capital-intensive business that needs money.

Finally, Marcos Menendez presented Momares, a nifty piece of technology to help small businesses market themselves through coupons delivered through opt-in SMS subscriptions. For his go-to-market strategy, Marcos has identified the bowling center market. He says that bowling centers are a booming sector, but they have a very specific problem: they lack traffic during weekdays. Well, Marcos, using his technology, believes he can increase weekday utilization by 200% – a bold and robust ROI value proposition. I asked him to create a couple of success stories to validate the assumptions, and then do a very focused PR campaign in the bowling center industry.

Of course, the solution applies to a much broader set of small business customers, making this an attractive business opportunity. I recently did a story on 3CInteractive that has built a $40M business based on a similar value proposition, but catering to large enterprises.

Someone from the audience asked how Momares differs from Groupon. Well, to get the discount on Groupon, consumers have to do some work – recruit other consumers – whereas Momares offers a straightforward opt-in coupon to your favorite business, whether it is a spa, a restaurant, or a bowling center.

Bottom line, I like this business!

You can listen to the recording of today’s roundtable here. Recordings of previous roundtables are all available here. You can register for the next roundtable here.

This segment is a part in the series : Roundtable Recap
. March 25 – A Mixed Bag Of Advice . April 1 – Bootstrapping Tips . April 8 – A Focus On E-Commerce . April 15 – Small Is OK; The Goal Is Profitability . April 22 – The Original Runners . April 29 – Finding The Right Direction . May 6 – Defining Value Proposition . May 20 – Validation, Validation, Validation . May 27 – Is The Venture Worth Your Time? . June 3 – Defining Market Segments . June 10 – Efficient Targeting . June 17 – Online Education Startups . June 24 – Three Startups That Can Hit One Million Dollars . July 1 - Get Your Pricing Model Validated . July 8 - The EJ Methodology . July 15 - A Market Of Late Adopters . July 22 - Bootstrap Using Services . July 29 - Startups In Malaysia . August 5 - Paying Customers =>Validation =>Valuation . August 19 - Niche E-Commerce Is Great For Bootstrapping . August 26 - 85%-90% Of Search Traffic Comes From Organic Search . September 2 - Find High Velocity Channels . September 9 - Open Opportunities In Cloud Computing And Rural BPO . September 16 – 5 Cloud Computing Opportunities for Entrepreneurs . September 23 - Do Not Spray And Pray . September 30 - Investors Don't Fund Broad Ideas . October 7 - Try To Get At Least $2M Pre-Money In Seed Round Valuation . October 14 - Professional Investors Do Not Invest In $20 Million Markets . October 21 - Bootstrapping Comes In Many Flavors . October 28 – Convert Potential Competitors To Partners . November 4 - Premium Lounge Sneak Preview . November 11 - African Tech Entrepreneurs Emerging . November 18 - Not Coming To The Rescue Of Victory . December 2 - Niche Marketplace Businesses Can Be Interesting . December 9 - Where Should You Raise Money? . December 16 - Top 10 Tech Trends To Watch . January 6 - Top 10 Vertical and Social Web Trends For The Decade . January 13 - Top 10 Online Advertising Trends For The Decade . January 20 - Personalization Remains An Open Problem . January 27 - Non-Dilutive Financing Through Revenue Sharing . February 3 - Indian Entrepreneurs Are Maturing . February 10 - When Keywords Are Competitive . February 17 - Indian Company Plugs Gap In Google’s Enterprise Solution . February 24 - VCs, Angels, Incubators, Accelerators – What Are You Doing With Your Rejects? . March 3 - Spotlight On The Northwest . March 10 - Spotlight On India . March 17 - Spotlight On Latin And Central America . March 24 - 75th Session Spotlights The Midwest . March 31 - Microsoft’s $100,000 India Startup Challenge Grant . April 6 - 1M/1M Announces Important Partnership With MAD Incubator, Malaysia . April 9 - 1M/1M Announces Partnership With TiE Chennai . April 16 - 1M/1M Partners With Indian Angel Network Incubator . April 17 - High-Octane Energy In Pune . April 21- Incubators Are Reaching Out To 1M/1M . April 28 - Guerrilla P.R. & SEO Most Profitable Customer Acquisition Strategies . May 5 - Ownership Matters . May 12 - Two Really Cool Companies . May 19, Making Money From Blogs . May 26 - Twitter, LinkedIn - Why Not Affiliates? . June 2 - 1M/1M And Incubators - What We Have Learned . June 9 - Silicon Valley . June 16 - Exciting Companies Lined Up For Microsoft Startup Grant Finals . June 23 - New Assessment Tool For Entrepreneurs . June 30 - Continued International Participation . July 21 - Crowd Sourced Funding Exchanges - An Emerging Trend . July 28 - Investors And Incubators Need To Look At Pre-Incubation . August 4 - How Do You Bootstrap Freemium Ventures? . August 11 - Menlo Park And The Silicon Valley Renaissance . August 25 - How To Use Twitter For Lead Generation . September 1 - Fall Call To Action . September 8 - A View Into Israeli Start-ups . September 15 - Do Your Homework First . September 22 - How Do You Catalyze A Region’s Entrepreneurship? . September 29 - From Poland To Argentina . October 6 - Dedicated To Steve Jobs, Reinforcing Mission To Restructure Capitalism . October 13 - FREE Is Not A Business Model . October 20 - Non-profits And For-profits . October 27 - Check Out Stanzr . November 3 - VCs Are Not Always Right . November 17 - Business Schools And Early Stage Entrepreneurship . December 1 - 1M/1M Premium Company Freshdesk Wins Funding From Accel Partners . December 8 - Three Open Opportunities For 2012 . December 15 - Web 3.0 And Social Dancing; Romania Emerging . December 22 - Free Apps, Ad-Supported Business Models => Dangerous! . January 5 - ERP Galore . January 12-13 - Spotlight On IIT Kharagpur, India . January 19 - Are Media Sites Fundable? . January 26th - Spotlight On Jacksonville, Florida . February 2 - YCombinator vs. 1M/1M . February 9 - Are You Fundable? . February 16 - What’s Happening In Turkey? . February 23 - Microsoft Israel To Offer 1M/1M Scholarships . March 1 - Strategy Gaps Need To Be Plugged . March 12 - Winners Of Microsoft Israel Scholarships . March 15 - Spotlight On 3 Day Startup Tel-Aviv . April 3 - Rendezvous In Bangalore . April 12 - More From Indian Entrepreneurs . April 19 - Tyranny Of The TAM . April 26 - A Rare Women-Only Session . May 3 - Some Wonderful Opportunities With Corporate Partners . May 10 - BlueSnap-Elance Contest Applications Deadline This Weekend . May 22 - Winners Of TechHub-A&N Media Battle Of The Startups Contest In London Win 1M/1M Scholarships