Taking On Microsoft And Google From India: InstaColl Founders Sumanth Raghavendra, Kaushal Cavale, And Their Mentor Sabeer Bhatia (Part 5)

SM: Do you have a sense of who your 70,000 beta users are? Have you asked them why they are interested in your product?

SR and KC: Most of them are people who have already tried apps such as Google Docs and are obviously not satisfied. They want a collaborative app but are not willing to sacrifice features. We feel that Google Docs and Zoho users who want all the advanced Office features plus the collaboration free are the low-hanging fruit. Google Docs has 25 million users and Zoho has 2 million users. That is the segment we want to tap into.

We expect that Google will put a lot of effort behind its Docs app and take it to the point where it is comparable to Office. I know the company has very good developers, but it will still be a long road for them. We can do things much quicker. We already have.

SM: It seems you imply that the reason Google has not delivered a full-featured office suite is because they have made some architectural choices that are limiting.

SR and KC: We don’t know if they made their choices after careful consideration or on the fly. Regardless, there are constraints.

SM: What are your other go-to-market strategies?

SR and KC: To offer the ‘Office as an appliance.’ We have a server that you can install in-house behind your firewall that integrates with other applications on a custom basis. Right now, when workers create documents, oftentimes they leave them on the desktops. Corporations have very little control over their document management. Our server allows all documents to be stored centrally. You can integrate documents with other applications such as workflow management applications. We are partnering with companies such as IBM and Sun for this.

Another strategy is to think of ‘Office as a utility.’ Microsoft controls the channel partnerships, but when it comes to ISPs there is no real relationship. We believe that ISPs can offer our application as a value-added service to their customers. A lot of ISPs are suffering because the ISP business model is becoming a commodity. They are all looking for value-added services to improve what they offer to customers. Every time a customer signs up for a broadband connection, he or she could get an Office suite.

Our final strategy is ‘Office as a feature.’ We often hear that anything new we do is a feature that Microsoft Office can have or could have at some time. We want to invert that. What if you could actually take Microsoft Office and all the collaborative productivity that comes with an application like ours and offer it as a feature within other applications where documents are created? There are a lot of business and consumer applications that auto-generate documents. All of those companies are potential candidates for our product. A user could edit the document and save the file directly to the source company.

SM: Have you conducted any proof-of-concept trials on your ‘Office as a feature’ strategy yet?

SR and KC: Yes. We have partnered with Box.net, which is a file sharing site. They approached us and told us that people were not happy with the way things were with Google Docs and Zoho. We will allow them to provide a new option to their 2 million users.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Taking On Microsoft And Google From India: InstaColl Founders Sumanth Raghavendra, Kaushal Cavale, And Their Mentor Sabeer Bhatia
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