Sumeet Anand Shares His Thoughts About #NASSCOMPC

Published on lighthouseinsights

Continuing our #NASSCOMPC interview series with speakers, today we share Sumeet Anand’s thoughts. Sumeet Anand will be at #NASSCOMPC and will be De-mystifying Enterprise 2.0 with his companionsGautam Ghosh, Vivek Paul and Vijay Doddavaram.Do you scratch your head when you are thrown with jargons such as social business, internal social networks, etc? Well frankly speaking I did but not any more. After an hour long discussion with Sumeet Anand, Founder of Kreeo, I was at ease with Enterprise 2.0. And I am sure you will also gain some clear idea about Enterprise 2.0 after you have read this interview.

1. Hi Sumeet! Thanks for talking, as the Founder of Kreeo we would love to know bit about Kreeo and what’s keeping you busy?

Thanks Prasant. For a decade I have been associated with e-learning, knowledge management and analytics as an IT consultant in organizations such as Satyam, NIIT, etc. Apart from this, I always had the dream to be an entrepreneur and after a few failures to start up, I finally got all pieces intact with Kreeo. Kreeo is an Enterprise 2.0 platform which is like the next generation of Knowledge Management and collaboration.

The journey of last 4 years with Kreeo has been quite exciting. As a bootstrapped startup we went through all ups and downs like other startups. During this time I was well supported by Hemant Srivastava who is a Co-Founder of Kreeo. Today we are serving some of the bigger names in the Indian industry like Standard Chartered Bank, AppLabs etc.

Today the biggest challenge for us is scaling up the sales effort, which keeps me busy all the time.

2. The market has quite a few competitors for Enterprise 2.0. So what is the USP of Kreeo to attract customers?

Enterprise 2.0 is a space that is getting too crowded with players like LinkedIn, Google, etc. also entering or planning to enter besides the traditional vendors like Oracle, IBM, MS etc.   However, our USP is that we have built a product that is aligned to business needs and is designed to solve real problems through social computing rather than just force fitting features. Being in the industry for quite a number of years in the Knowledge management space and have done award winning work, I am very well aware of the challenges that are often faced by businesses going the traditional way.   Kreeo’s contemporary technology, architecture and design are its backbone. For e.g. it gives a flexible and intelligent way of storing and organizing information thus makes information discovery simpler and intelligent.  It also helps in creating unified content/knowledge bases and avoids getting information unnecessarily split across silos of wikis, blogs, forums etc.  Traditional systems still work on legacy architectures and are evolved incrementally but Kreeo is designed for social computing and from scratch the way it should be done today.  With Kreeo, customers can do it all on their own without needing much help from the vendor and without much training.

However, like every product Kreeo too has its own set of challenges like to evolve and keeping that in mind we have built Kreeo as a unified product with a NoSQL database and platform capabilities to provide our customers with the power and flexibility to evolve with least total cost of ownership(TCO) that they don’t get with traditional vendors. In near future, we are moving to hybrid databases with our latest version and that will really scale up Kreeo in the Enterprise 2.0 segment. I believe besides technology our complete solution approach (services+customizations) will always be the biggest USP of Kreeo.

3. You represent one of the speakers in the Nasscom Product Conclave where you would be sharing your thoughts on de-mystifying Enterprise 2.0. Can you share in brief what the discussion is about?

Yes I am part of this talk, I will be managing/moderating the session and I will be sharing the dais with Vivek Paul, Gautam Ghosh and Vijay Doddavaram.

The so called gurus and the pundits of the industry have coined a plethora of similar meaning jargons like Enterprise 2.0, social business, internal social networks etc. that has confused the market.  I and my fellow speakers will try to demystify this space and bring out the real meaning of E2.0. With this we would tell what the crux is and how Enterprise 2.0 is different from the traditional methods of collaboration and knowledge sharing and how businesses can apply it.

I also feel that adoption of Enterprise 2.0 in India is going to be a challenge. If you have the culture in your company then it will be fine but if you haven’t then you will need lot of help from HR and that is where Gautam Ghosh will share his thoughts and experience.

So as an Indian business, if you are excited about Enterprise 2.0, it is great but to make it work you have to be ready for the change.

4. Although we have seen Indian businesses adopting Enterprise 2.0 but we still have lot of gaps. What do you think are the challenges in implementing Enterprise 2.0?

As discussed in my earlier answer, along with adoption there are some more challenges for Indian businesses which could be listed as follows:

1. Cultural Challenge: Mindset has to change if you are going to implement Enterprise 2.0 in your organization.

2. Education and Awareness: This is a challenge and lot of work needs to be done here too. Saying that off late I have seen there has been change and I have seen early adopters too.

3. Finally India is still not ready for the SaaS way. MNC’s are not ready to put all their data setup on the cloud and SME’s wish to enjoy free services. Hence monetization from SaaS is a big challenge in India today.

5. In your opinion how does the future look like for Enterprsie2.0 from an Indian perspective?

India is definitely a good market and that’s one of the reasons why we are presently concentrating in the Indian market only. The economic conditions are far better if you compare with the European market. Enterprise 2.0 will be easier to sell if the offerings are business oriented and value proposition is strong, it needs to be realized by the customers as a “must have” rather than a “good to have” stuff.

Solutions that will sell easily will need to add value to the end customers of the enterprise.   E2.0 is not a fad but the biggest opportunity for companies to generate competitive advantage through innovative application of this concept in their business.  One size fits all is not the way to innovate, companies must innovate and then adapt the concept before applying to their business.

6. Finally, Nasscom Product Conclave is one of the events that is harnessing the Indian startup community. What would be your advice to the young entrepreneurs and why shouldn’t they miss this event?

Nasscom product conclave is one of the best places to be at if you are an Indian entrepreneur for the following reasons:

1. Get real insights from veterans, gurus, and fellow entrepreneurs.

2. Get real exposure and insights on the Indian market.

3. And definitely a good opportunity to network with potential customers, investors and peers.

I was fortunate enough to get introduced to Standard Chartered Bank at a NASSCOM event who later became our first MNC customer. So if you are an Indian entrepreneur, then you definitely got to be at the NASSCOM Product Conclave.

A few words of advice to entrepreneurs:

“Today, everything conventional is challenged, so try and not apply conventional wisdom, rather think from scratch and innovate.” Challenge the status quo and solve problems not just of today but tomorrow.

“Entrepreneurship is not about part time but lifetime” so don’t moonlight for long take the plunge and start your journey because “an idea is like a baby, easy to conceive but painful to deliver.”

Thanks Sumeet! Enterprise 2.0 should be the way and I think that it would be the way going further. Even though with the present set of challenges that Sumeet has listed, I am positive. Aren’t you excited about Enterprise 2.0? Or are you bogged down with the present set of challenges?