It is the time for announcement of quarterly results and as far as the Indian scenario goes, the superb results announced by Infosys has raised the mood of optimism. Globally, Intel and IBM Global Services have surpassed expectations, while Accenture has delivered reasonable results. The market awaits, with cautious optimism, the announcement of results of other Indian and global heavyweights.  

Moving on, the last year has been marked by more visits of CEOs of leading American high tech corporations to India than ever before. We have had Michael Dell,  Samuel J Palmisano, Bill Gates and  Paul S. Otellini, to name a few. And every one of them has announced an order of magnitude expansion in the size of their R&D operations in India . And, what’s more, they have also explicitly stated that the core product dev elopment would also be done out of India . This is indeed a sea change from the early and mid nineties when captive centers of such companies were engaged in non core activities. Undoubtedly, an offshore element is becoming central to the core product dev elopment strategy of global product corporations. The mid-sized product companies are moving even faster, and there has been news of companies setting up dedicated centers in India, almost daily.  

All this portends well for the Indian IT industry in more than one way. Firstly, of course, the recruitment plans of the large companies are big, and this will provide job opportunities to a large number of people, and thereby also provide a fillip to the overall industry growth. More importantly, this will allow a critical mass of people to acquire genuine product development skills. And this would create the right platform for the emergence of successful product companies from India in the years to come.  

Compared to ten years ago, there are many more examples of companies that are pursuing a product based business model. Iflex and Infosys’ Banking product have attained scale, while companies like Pramati and Subex Systems are emerging stars. This issue of Confluence focuses on product companies and initiatives.  

One such company with global aspirations, that Prayag has watched closely, is Servion^t Global, focused on providing “business response” solutions to Indian and global end-user and technology companies. In this edition of Confluence, we carry an interview with their CEO, Raghunandan in the “Tomorrow Makers” section.  

Creating a successful product company requires a thorough understanding of product creation and support functions, as well as product marketing and selling.  From concept to implementation- or from idea generation to execution, the market understanding required, the skills needed to translate a market-worthy idea into a saleable product, and the processes that are required to create a genuine product, and support it over time, are fairly unique and scarce. And this is one reason why many Indian companies have not been able to successfully “make products” -  though the reason adduced more often is that the costs required to market a product are prohibitive.  And, it is these skills that will get imbibed owing to the exponential increase in product dev elopment activity out of India , especially by world class companies.  

Next we move on to the other important attribute- marketing and selling a product. While the principles of services marketing and product marketing are not as divergent as the dev elopment and execution of the same, product marketing has certain nuances that need to be well understood. Product pricing, and positioning are not very straight forward exercises.  In fact, we have come across few examples of companies that are able to demonstrate the value of their product to their customers. In keeping with this idea, the Focus article of this issue talks about the most commonly encountered product differentiation strategies.  

While on the topic of selling, the challenges are more in today’s difficult market conditions, and for companies that do not have an established brand name. So, we thought it fit to cover the tactics adopted by an emerging player, Mitoken. We feature some of the best practices in sales adopted by Mitoken under the best practices section.

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