On March 29, 2015 we launched this blog to honor the men and women who over the past 24 years have come together to create assets and platforms of immense elegance and inspired by the conviction that robust solutions are built on the foundation of simple and elegant algorithms that do not necessarily require software architecture punditry. In doing so they collaborated to build products and solutions that have withstood the test of time. At a time when most insurance solution efforts were spectacular failures resulting in serious losses in time, effort and investments of up to $ 30 Million, the humble, grassroots effort of counting success one happy customer at a time was slowly being noticed by the Industry that had dismissed the effort as romantic and naïve. The industry was further astounded that we were also nimble adopters of transformational technology such as the Internet and many of our customers found this to be a real and measurable business edge over their much larger competitors. They were no longer customers. They became friends deeply appreciative of our contribution to their business.
Our emphasis on being real, not disrespecting our customers as only a means to attain annual revenue objectives and above all the belief that operating as an inspired team that stays together will help us more than meet whatever challenges future brings was at the core of this durable and successful endeavor. It was in the best tradition of entrepreneurship and we were proud of it.
We realized that we don’t want that spirit to fade away. It may or may not meet the benchmarks of the market that crown winners and losers on impersonal and hackneyed benchmarks. That is neither our aspiration nor our style. And when we look around we find that some of the greatest companies have a genesis similar to ours. We have company.
A pioneering spirit and willingness to take on whatever future brings is the oxygen of a blue blooded entrepreneurship. And that we had in abundance.
At a time when the Internet was largely unheard of, when business IT landscape was dominated by closed, proprietary technology, and when Indian IT was more about sourcing the best and brightest of India (schooled in elite institutions) that labored on mundane tasks of writing code that was more appropriate for a high schooler, we dreamt of developing a world class enterprise solution for a vertical industry. For many it seemed stupid and foolish. And maybe they were right.
Our capital was a pioneering spirit. While we don’t claim to have invented the sliced bread, we feel we were one of the first adapters of committing to an open platform, a vertical solution on relational database, offshore development center focused on the IP business, and the Internet. We went on our own terms to customers and bagged some prestigious projects (sometimes against billion dollar corporations). While these undertakings were the engines of our customers business, nearly all Indian IT companies were tweaking departmental software or writing code under strict customer’s control. They got the revenues, we got respect. And we preferred it that way.
After a brief detour, we are back on our journey that started 25 years ago…..
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