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Rukmini Priyadarshini

`If you know your market and customers, leave the software completely to us,' says this player. Game for this kind of relationship?

A PRODUCT person at heart, Aditi Technologies' Pradeep Singh is determined he won't do `grunt work', as he terms it, for corporate IT.

"We started and remain a product company," he asserts. Spin offs and subsidiaries later, Aditi still has Microsoft as its earliest and anchor client for whose product groups it delivers outsourced product development work.

Since last year, however, Singh says a quarter of the company's $27 million revenues are from a new type of technology company. Ones with little or no technology expertise!

If an entrepreneur understands a market well and has a good idea of how to address a specific user problem in that industry, "we will build the whole software product for them," he says. They don't need a CTO (chief technical officer.) "Our clients bring domain knowledge and a product idea. We will bring our software product lifecycle knowledge to the table and build the software product and manage its lifecycle so they can win in their markets.''

For instance, if a bunch of pharma industry veterans decide there is a need to integrate consumers' insurance policy parameters at the retail point of a pharma sale, Aditi says it will manage the whole software product lifecycle — from requirements gathering and analysis, architecture design and specification, coding and testing, delivery and deployment, maintenance and evolution to retirement.

"We will write the final specifications, do the user interface, design the architecture, write code and ship the product. We can also leverage our software product lifecycle expertise to build out the product roadmap and manage the lifecycle for our customers,'' says Singh.

In a move that will take the core competence argument to its logical conclusion, he says his customers only need to know their market and their customers. Once the context is defined, Aditi will deliver the software product.

"We know the ins and outs of a software product roadmap — that is what we do best and we love doing it. We are now finding takers for this type of a relationship. We will not do assembly-line services — Aditi's move to offer end-to-end product development is a conscious choice," he asserts.

Can innovation be really outsourced? How can a company possibly outsource the core of its value and hope to survive, let alone compete and succeed? What about IP protection? Is it not a lot to ask of a company to let Aditi be their CTO, as Singh suggests?

The business landscape is changing. As software ceases to be an enabler of corporate internal functions and is increasingly embedded in everyday objects of consumer use, it is domain knowledge that will determine the innovativeness of a product for an industry, according to Singh.

Software product development is an important part of the whole business but the customer interface, the marketing expertise, and the feel for users' needs can only come from domain experts, he says.

"We are taking the view that software product development too is a specialised expertise that we can offer savvy entrepreneurs and companies to let them realise their product."

Aditi guarantees IP protection but quite often it takes a lot of convincing and paperwork, he concedes. "Our clients also realise that to be really successful they need to be competitive and have a feedback loop into their whole proposition. Most clients come through referrals and ours is a more equal relationship. We are a high-end software boutique, not a testing factory."

The company, which does about 60 per cent of its work onsite, expects to increase the offshore component to about half. The driving focus now is to get talent for the company.

Aditi is building products into pharma retail that works with an insurance angle and also has the potential for outbound marketing; is creating a trading platform for stock brokers for a start-up; and has created a product to enable secure sharing of digital content (games, music etc.)

Picture by K.K. Mustafah

priya@thehindu.co.in

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