Monthly Archives: April 2010

“World-class software products can come out of India” – Interview with CEO of Druva

We now have in our midst a startup success story that will hopefully inspire a 100 new software product startups in Pune.

PuneTech and the Pune Open Coffee Club both started about 2 years ago, and the steadily increasing memberships and vitality of these communities points to a very strong startup community in Pune. However, throughout those two years, one question always cast a doubt on the long-term potential of this startup ecosystem. And that question was: Where are the success stories?

Druva Software is a Pune-based backup software product startup. Click on the logo to see all PuneTech articles about backup software (mostly about Druva)
Druva Software is a Pune-based backup software product startup. Click on the logo to see all PuneTech articles about backup software (mostly about Druva)

Druva software (previously known as Druvaa) which just closed a $5 million round of funding led by Sequoia Capital answers that question. Of course, getting a round of VC funding is not as good an indicator of success as an IPO or an acquisition. And of course, there have been other successes in the past. But still this news is great, for the following reasons:

  • Druva is a purely homegrown startup. This is not a company started by someone in the US setting up a development center in India.
  • Druva is a product startup. It is not a services company. Hence, it has a potential for exponential growth and returns.
  • Druva is not done by serial entrepreneurs. The co-founders are all first-time entrepreneurs who quit their big-company jobs to start Druva. This should give hope to all the first-time entrepreneurs in Pune.
  • There haven’t been many high-profile successes in recent times, and this one comes as a breath of fresh air.

Druva has been one of PuneTech’s favorite startups. With 5 different PuneTech articles, this is probably the company that has received maximum coverage from us. And a quick look at the articles gives hints as to why:

  • It is a product company, which is always more interesting than a services company; it’s especially interesting to watch the product evolve over time.
  • It requires some very complex technology, not something that any company could easily build. Plus, they are happy to write detailed technical articles about the technology that underlies their products.
  • It has repeatedly featured in high profile startup events in India, from proto.in to the NASSCOM summit

PuneTech spoke to Jaspreet Singh, CEO of Druva, over the phone, and here are some quick notes based on this conversation. There are a number of unique features here that other Pune entrepreneurs would do well to take note of.

On the current state of the company

Druva has $2.5 million revenue run rate, coming from about 400+ customer deployments. Most of this is from their flagship product, the inSync remote laptop disk-to-disk backup solution. Recently they also introduced Phoenix a remote server disk-to-disk backup solution. They have about 23 employees, most of them in Pune, with a few sales people elsewhere. The product is developed entirely in Pune.

How do they manage enterprise support for 400 customers with such a small employee base?

Although supporting their customers is a very high priority for Druva, one of the things they focus on very hard is to make the product very easy to use and very easy to support – so that to a large extent, most of their customers don’t really require any support. They have a “release often” philosophy which ensures that customers always have the latest, bug-fixed, version of the software.

Another area that they put a lot of effort in, is in ensuring that the product is easy to install. A lot of their customer testimonials speak of how easy it was to self-install the software. By contrast, the comparable software from the more established players in the market requires professional services help for installation.

How do they manage sales without a strong US/Europe presence?

Instead of the tradition of hand-holding that is a common feature of enterprise sales in this domain, Druva decided to go a different route. They made their software freely downloadable from the web, and made it easy to install and try. As a result, most of their customers approach them after having first tried the product out via the website. And many of their sales, even large ones, have happened over skype/email, with no in-person customer visits.

How do they compete with the large MNCs, the established players in this market?

We were very surprised to learn that Druva does not try to compete with the incumbents on cost. Jaspreet told us that in fact the average Druva sale tends to be 3x more expensive than the comparative offering from the established players. Druva scores on ease of use, simplicity, and most imporantly, the technology.

Jaspreet points out that one of Druva’s strong points is the easy-to-use source-level de-duplication. Which means that when backing up a laptop, they can ignore duplicate content even before the data is sent to the remote backup server. Specifically consider the gigabytes of windows operating system files on your laptop. Most of these files are likely to be identical across all laptops of a company. Druva’s software would know beforehand that there is a copy of those files on the backup server, and would never send it across. Such optimizations ensure that backing up 15 TeraBytes of data from a number of different laptops just results in about 2 or 3 TeraBytes being send across the network. This results in an increase in speed, reduction in network bandwidth consumed, and in disk-space consumed.

By contrast, traditional backup systems do de-duplication at the destination. Which means that all the data is sent to the server over the network, and only then is the server able to remove duplicate content. This means that the speed and network bandwidth improvements are lost.

Also, claims Jaspreet, Druva’s backups are fully searchable – a feature that is not available with most competitors.

What is their primary challenge currently?

Jaspreet says that they want to build a high-quality, world-class product, and for that he needs lots of high-quality, world-class people. While they’ve obviously managed to build a team like that which got them so far, they need many more such people in the coming days, and that’s a significant challenge. He says that it is difficult, if not impossible to find “readymade” world-class talent here (even when “world-class” salary and/or equity is offered!). Instead, he feels that the only approach that works is to find individuals (whether freshers or industry veterans) who have the right attitude and potential and then nurture them into the required shape.

(As an aside, we’d like to point out that is a pattern. Pretty much every startup we talk to mentions hiring of high-quality people as one of their primary challenges. This is a problem that needs a solution, and I’m hoping that some entrepreneur in Pune is looking at this as an opportunity.)

Parting thoughts: In the Druva co-founders, we have people who have been through the entire process, from zero to VC-funding, in Pune, recently. And they are nice guys. Pune entrepreneurs should take advantage of this, and flock to them for guidance, advice and mentorship.

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Get started with Flex 4 with Sujit Reddy Adobe India Evangelist – April 10

Adobe Flex
Adobe Flex is a software development kit released by Adobe Systems for the development and deployment of cross-platform rich Internet applications based on the Adobe Flash platform. Image via Wikipedia

Adobe India Evangelist  (Sujit Reddy) will be  conducting a ‘Adobe Flex 4’ Tour foucing on getting the community get started with “Flex 4” and get everyone in sync with their “Designer/Developer Workflow”.

Topic(s) to be covered:

  • Flash Builder 4
  • What’s new in Flex 4/LifeCycle DS 3
  • Flex 4 Component Lifecyle
  • A peek at Flash Player 10.1 on Android

Date: 10th April, Saturday

Time: 1PM – 4PM  (15-30 mins for Questions)

Venue: 407 (4th Floor), SICSR, Model Colony (www.sadakmap.com/p/SICSR/map)

Registration and Fees: This event is free. Anyone can attend. Register here.

FAQ

Is this is a paid event?

No, It’s free for all, and for Devigner’s by Devigner’s.

Who should attend this?

Anyone who is a Flex/Flash enthusiast or looking to get hand’s dirty with this amazing tool for building RIA.

I am a student, am I eligible?

Technology never had any barriers, it does not ask us this question. If you are student, you should make a point in attending this event. It gives you a broader perspective on building web/desktop applications.

Can i follow this on Twitter?

To follow updates on Adobe UG Tour, watch on the following hastag #AdobeUGTour

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PuneTech’s “Monetization Plan” was an April Fools Day Prank

Our article yesterday, about our “Sponsored Saturdays” and “Pay Per Tweet” monetization plan was an April Fools Day prank.

Actually, we were overwhelmed by the amount and intensity of the response generated by that article. In fact, we feel bad for having toyed with the feelings of all the people who actually got fooled by that article and brought such strong emotions and passion to the comments.

Sorry.

And hopefully, you’ll forgive us this moment of fun.

– – –

The post generated a huge number of comments. At the time of writing this article, there are 78 comments. There were three kinds of commentors on that post:

  • Those who left a comment pointing out that this was an April Fools Day prank. We held all those comments in moderation until this morning, to ensure that the fun did not end prematurely. So nobody saw those comments yesterday, while the debate raged on. They are now visible, but marked with a [***]. So when you read all those comments, remember that the comments marked with a [***] were not visible yesterday.
  • Those who realized that this is a prank, but decided to join the fun and leave fake comments. I should point out that this was not pre-planned by us. Of these commentors, only Arun and Amit Kumar knew about the prank beforehand – all others guessed and jumped into the fray on their own. You guys made this much more fun than we had imagined!
  • Those who did not realize that this is a prank, and either expressed their displeasure with the new policy, or defended our right to monetize in this way. To all of you: our sincere thanks for taking the time out to let your feelings be known. While this time it was just a prank, we do really hope that in the future you will let us know your feedback when tricky policy issues regarding PuneTech do crop up, as they sometimes do. Especially the ones who blasted us – we do need readers like that to keep us pointed in the correct direction. Thanks again.

– – –

In any case, you must read the comments. It will be an entertaining experience. As they say, iss meiN drama haiN, emotion haiN, comedy haiN, tragedy haiN. Just remember that all comments marked with a [***] were not visible yesterday.

Also, you do subscribe to the PuneTech comments feed (or comments-by-email), don’t you?

– – –

Even the PuneMirror got fooled. In this (unrelated) article they wrote about TechMarathi, they included the following line:

[PuneTech] was until recently a non-profit venture. They have just introduced a paid content section for one day of the week.

Oh well…

– – –

Vishwajeet left a comment with the best conspiracy theory explanation:

It seems you have taken an appropriate day for announcing this, if it does not goes well among the community than you can take it back as April fool’s day prank 🙂 way to go.

No. This was always an April Fools Day prank. Arun, Anup and Amit Kumar, the 3 fake “customers” whom we “quoted” in the article knew that this was a prank (because we had to take their permission to misuse their names in this way).

– – –

Titash asked this pertinent question:

Is monetisation a must for every human endeavor?

Although we argued with Titash yesterday while the game was being played, in reality, we do agree with Titash. Our answer is a resounding no. We have no intentions of monetizing PuneTech.

There was some discussion about sustainability of PuneTech, but here’s the point: It takes very little hard cash to keep PuneTech running. The only expenses we have are the domain name and hosting, both of which are cheap enough that we don’t mind paying from our own pockets.

The main “investment” in PuneTech is in terms of time – our own time, as well as the time of so many other members of the tech community in Pune who do things for the community. So, if we must worry about sustainability, we should think in terms of time and not money.

Money cannot buy the quality that Pune Tech needs. Passion is not for sale. Sure, we could use money to pay for getting PuneTech a decent, much needed, design. But that’s not really what PuneTech is about. Money won’t buy high quality content. Money couldn’t have bought this article by Dhananjay Nene, nor this article by Addepalli. You couldn’t have paid Abhijit Athavale to start PuneChips and TechMarathi certainly wont be able to afford all the volunteers who work on it.

Time is more than money! So please “sponsor” PuneTech by donating some of your time. Write an article.

– – –

13-year old UpaPilot commented:

Rs. 10k per post? Are you mad?

I think he was on to something there…

– – –

Asuph said:

And Navin, you’re taking this too far. Even fake ‘angry’ commentors!

No, we did not fake any angry commentors! The fake angry commentors were genuine. This is just another example of the community coming forward to help out. Isn’t UGC (user generated content) great?

– – –

The Discrete Log vs Indiscrete Log comments were just too funny! Hats off Shashikant and Dhananjay!

– – –

Still can’t decide whether Anil was fooled (exhibit 1, exhibit 2, exhibit 3) or not. But I guess this comment forces us to give him the benefit of doubt.

– – –

You can all go back to work now. The …umm… “future of Pune will suffer” if you don’t!

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Introducing “Sponsored Saturdays” – paid articles on the PuneTech blog & twitter account

(Update: This article was a PuneTech April Fools Prank. For a full apologyexplanation, see our article on 2 April.)

At PuneTech, one of the things that gives us pleasure is coming up with new ways in which this site can help the tech community in Pune. To quote Dhananjay Nene, we display a “willingness to experiment, learn and retry.” With this in mind, we are introducing a new feature that will help local small businesses, our readers, and us, all at the same time – Sponsored Posts on PuneTech – a win-win-win situation.

Of the 2 years we’ve been in existence, for 1-1/2 of them we’ve been refusing offers for paid advertisements and paid job postings on PuneTech because we don’t want to commercialize PuneTech. However, after receiving many impassioned pleas from small local startups, we have reached the conclusion that we have hit upon a major pain point, a desperate need that needs to be filled. Small startups cannot afford the normal PR and job posting channels and the future of Pune is suffering because of that. There is no good channel for small local companies to market themselves and get much needed visibility. Mainstream media is too big, too broad, and too expensive – and most importantly, generates very little long-term impact (or conversions).

After thinking over this problem for a long time, we have decided to allow commercial postings on PuneTech. We believe this is not really a reversal of our “not commercial” policy – is more of a social service.

With this in mind, we are introducing Sponsored Saturdays. Every Saturday, the PuneTech blog and front page will feature a paid article, which will either be a company profile written by the company itself, or a set of job postings by the company. The article will be clearly marked as a “Sponsored Post”. A flat price of Rs. 10,000 entitles a sponsor to post an article on the PuneTech blog on the next available Saturday slot. This will also be cross posted to twitter, the PuneTech linked-in group, and will go out in the PuneTech RSS Feed and to the e-mail subscribers. There will be no other posts on PuneTech for the next 48 hours – i.e. the sponsored post will stay on the front page until Monday morning. Single tweet postings may be purchased at Rs. 500 per tweet. We will consider special discounted rates for small and deserving companies who are not yet funded.

We are very pleased with the reactions we are getting from our early sponsors. Anup Tapadia, founder of of TouchMagix, who bought the first sponsored slot this Saturday, has high hopes from this program:

Through the normal channels, it is really difficult to find high quality programmers for the kind of cutting edge work we are doing in Pune. For example, a post on the standard job sites brings us hundreds of resumes, but not one of the candidates can answer basic computer science questions. Given the kind of readership PuneTech has, we are expecting to get some very good resumes.

Amit Kumar Singh, who plans on using this service to find customers for his software, says:

Finding the first few customers for a new product is the most difficult. And a sale to local customers will be much easier because the trust factor will be higher. All I’m expecting is 10 signups, and I’m sure word-of-mouth will take care of the rest.

Arun Prabhudesai of Trak.in commented:

All bloggers and mainstream media are doing this, either publicly or secretly. I don’t understand why you guys waited so long. But I’m glad you are finally doing it. Count me in.

For sponsoring a post, and for a copy of the detailed terms and conditions, please write to: sponsor@punetech.com. We do have some legal fine print, but the basic terms are these – the sponsored posts must be related to Pune, must be relevant to readers of PuneTech, and must adhere to the standards of quality of the rest of the PuneTech website. PuneTech reserves the right to refuse any sponsored post for any reason whatsoever, and the decision of the PuneTech editors if final.

We hope that many local companies take advantage of this opportunity.

Note: A majority of the PuneTech advisory board are in full support of our decision, and completely agree with us that this move will be welcomed by the tech community in Pune. In the interest of full transparency, we would like to disclose that two of our advisors who did not agree with this decision have resigned from the board. However, we are confident that after a few months of successfully running this program, we will be able to convince them to re-join.

We will continue to tweak and fine tune this program based on the response and feedback we receive. So please let us know your thoughts in the comments below. Thanks.


2nd April Update: As noted at the top, this article was an April Fools Day prank. To ensure that comments on this post did not give away the prank too early, all comments that mentioned “April Fools Day” were held in moderation until the end of the day. All these comments have now been approved, but we have prefixed these comments with a [***]. When reading the comments below, please note that all comments beginning with the [***] were not visible to anybody on 1st April.