Smart City Use Cases and Opportunities: Jay Chandan, CEO of Gorilla Technology (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: The point that I’m probing here is, you have a cybersecurity business. Then you have a transportation management business. Is that the best way to manage a business to have such diversity? In each of those, you’re going to encounter pure play providers. Cybersecurity is an extraordinarily competitive market. You’re going to be facing all the competition from the cybersecurity world.

Jay Chandan: We do not claim to be the best-of-breed on every single product. What I’m telling you is that we want to be the best-of-breed when it comes to providing a smart city holistic solution. If that involves integrating other products and providing services as part of my solution, it is okay with me.

I’ll give you an example. I’m working on a large project where I’ve got 14 vendors creating a solution for the customer. The customer doesn’t need to know the complexity. We’re creating a fully-baked cake for him with the icing. The icing is our solution on top of it. We’re providing an end-to-end cybersecurity solution. The leading cybersecurity solution providers are working with us where we can create value for the customer.

A solution’s smartness is not determined by who the solution provider is. It’s the infrastructure based around what technology the customer gets. It’s about how effective it is. They’re looking for a very confident player who can help build and create a progressive land for them.

When customers come to us, we don’t provide a customer reference. We provide them a country. We’ve been entrenched in the deepest parts of Taiwan. The reason we won this very large project is because they sat down in our Taiwanese office for 8 to 12 months and worked with our customers. They understood the pitfalls and built the proof of concept with us.

Sramana Mitra: You answered my question on the pure play point products within the smart city portfolio. You are the main tier one system integrator in the smart city buying cycle. This positioning which you have chosen is in competition with the Accentures of the world who also have significant smart city practices. How do you compete with them?

Jay Chandan: I don’t compete with them at all. The way we work with customers is we work on a smaller scale. I can give you a live example. We currently work with a customer who wanted to build a proof of concept for a 5G lawful interception project.

The proof of concept was less than a million dollars. We built the proof of concept for the customer, proved that it works, and now the project that we will potentially sign will be about $30 million. The first day when we entered the discussion, they didn’t have a clue as to what they wanted or how they were going to go about it.

We spend a lot of our time educating the customer. That’s money that we invest in the customer. It has taken us three years. We spent time, effort, and money and built a very tiny proof of concept at our own expense. It got them to get a budget allocated for the proof of concept. Based on the proof of concept, got a bigger budget. We don’t compete with Accenture or IBM. In fact, we prefer to work with them because we can go in and provide these little solutions for them.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Smart City Use Cases and Opportunities: Jay Chandan, CEO of Gorilla Technology
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