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Scaling an Analytics Services Business to $30 Million: Axtria CEO Jaswinder Chadha (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What is your model? Do you do services? Do you have products? What’s the business?

Jaswinder Chadha: It’s all of the above but we, primarily, view ourselves as a services company. Even software today is a services business. In some ways, we have an advantage in that we came from building products and delivering services on this platform. Typically, product companies don’t have a strong DNA of delivering services to clients. Fortunately, we do.

We invested a significant amount in building products. We actually have a number of accelerators and platforms that we use to deliver business planning, business analytics, and business process management services to the clients. >>>

Scaling a Technology Company Against Major Competitors: Solix CEO Sai Gundavelli (Part 5)

Sai Gundavelli: From a technology perspective, I always ask the question, “Why Solix?” Why would any customer buy from us? I focused a lot on that. I focused on engineering. That was the first thing from a technology perspective. We wanted to be a price leader. We’ll make it easy for customers to acquire our solution. We provide a subscription-based pricing. We had a perpetual license based pricing. The third was we were focused on happy customers. With every implementation, we try very hard to make them a happy customer.

Sramana Mitra: This sounds very qualitative. I tend to see situations where small companies compete with a lot of competitors especially when they’re competing with competitors with deep pocket channels. One way people do that is by being able to do something that these larger competitors are not able to do. What was that? I’m sure those guys are also saying we provide great support. We provide great user experience. It’s very hard to sell on that message. >>>

Scaling a Technology Company Against Major Competitors: Solix CEO Sai Gundavelli (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: At what point did you bring in the first financing? Walk me through the financing history of the company.

Sai Gundavelli: As I was building the company, I was also looking for funds, but I didn’t want to go through the VC route. One of my good friends heard the story and he introduced me to one of his doctor friends in Los Angeles. I presented my story. He liked my story and immediately wrote me a check for $1 million. Then there is a company back in India where I’m an investor too. That also provided me some funding. That gave me the initial support for building the organization.

Sramana Mitra: How much money in total have you raised from angels?

Sai Gundavelli: I would say it would be close to $8 million. We run the organization very lean and mean. I’m a >>>

Taking On The Big Guys: Chrome River Co-Founder and COO Dave Terry (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me more about what were the circumstances of starting this new company.

Dave Terry: We had a large ERP system for these large law firms. ChromeRiver does expense reporting. We automate the labor-intensive and error-prone workflow process of expense reporting and supplier invoice management. While I was still at Elite, some of our largest customers came to us and said they wanted a robust expense reporting solution. We, just like all ERP systems, had a very shallow module for expense reporting. You could put in your expenses and it routed to someone for approval. Then, it was off for payment. This was 10 years ago.

There were a number of systems that were starting to evolve. Even with all of our robust resources, we decided to partner with another app at that time. We partnered with Extensity. Our main competitor in the ERP space for these large professional services went out and partnered with another company. In the ensuing years, each of those solutions were leapfrogged by another company called Concur. >>>

Scaling an Analytics Services Business to $30 Million: Axtria CEO Jaswinder Chadha (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What about your operations team? Part of the people who were executing on these projects were in India? Is that why you raised money from Bangalore?

Jaswinder Chadha: Yes. Actually, we raised money before we set up our operations in India. We were one of the companies to do data analytics in India. We were the first and the largest data analytics company built out of India.

Sramana Mitra: You raised your first institutional round at about $12 million a year run rate?

Jaswinder Chadha: Correct.

Sramana Mitra: How far did you go before you sold the company?

Jaswinder Chadha: We grew the business to about $50 million in revenues. We sold the company in 2007 to Cognizant. >>>

Scaling a Technology Company Against Major Competitors: Solix CEO Sai Gundavelli (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What’s the killer app for what you were offering? Where did you find traction in the enterprise? What part of the enterprise was looking for this kind of enhanced search capabilities?

Sai Gundavelli: That’s a good question. A lot of enterprises had implemented Oracle applications, using which their data started to grow and their backups were taking a longer time. Planning for disaster recovery was also becoming tougher. Oracle also charges based on the CPU utilization. If the company has got 10 years of data and if they’re processing it, they obviously need more CPU. The more CPU you have, the more software licenses you pay. You’re still processing data from 10 years back and you’re still putting the entire data set on the same storage. Our killer app helps archive the data. You put all your active and usable items in the living room. The items that you don’t use that frequently, you put in the garage. That was the value proposition. That’s how we built the technology in terms of how to optimize their application data. >>>

Taking On The Big Guys: Chrome River Co-Founder and COO Dave Terry (Part 1)

Chrome River is successfully taking on Concur (now SAP) in the expense reporting SaaS space. Find out how.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of circumstances?

Dave Terry: I was born in Texas. I went to school at the University of Texas. I have a degree in Computer Science and Math. I came out of college spinning the propeller on my head. I was a program developer and moved to software programming field.

Sramana Mitra: What year was that?

Dave Terry: This was 1987. I began developing software. My first job was in programming. Fortunately, I fell into a job where I was developing software for large ERP systems for law firms. There was this company out of Dallas that was doing that. I was a software developer developing back-end, time billing, financial management, and AP automation for large law firms around the globe. >>>

Scaling an Analytics Services Business to $30 Million: Axtria CEO Jaswinder Chadha (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double-click on that a bit. You founded marketRx in which year?

Jaswinder Chadha: In 2000.

Sramana Mitra: You self-financed that project?

Jaswinder Chadha: No. The first round of financing was friends and family. We did another round of financing from angel investors. The third round was when we brought in a group by the name of Westbridge Capital in Bangalore, which eventually became Sequoia India.

Sramana Mitra: I know Westbridge really well actually. What was the stage? You launched the company with some friends and family money. What was the next step? What kind of customer traction were you able to get before getting the angel money? >>>