Shirish Deodhar: The Race Continues

Shirish Deodhar, CEO and Co-founder, Sapience Analytics believes in continuous improvement and delivering high-value products

It is believed that success and failure is not in anybody's hands. "What is in our control is to have a fierce commitment to build an outstanding product that delivers high value, keep improving it, reach out to prospects and sell effectively, provide excellent and timely support to our customers, and keep engaged with them to share best practices and learn from their usage of the product. If we can truly imbibe this spirit, then there is nothing to fear, but only the desire to keep executing well," says Shirish Deodhar, CEO and Co-founder, Sapience Analytics.

From where the road started
By 2009, Shirish Deodhar had 20+ years of experience in founding, building and scaling IT services companies in outsourced product development. With a track record of building world class products for California startups and successful companies like VERITAS Software (now part of Symantec), he decided to try and develop a successful product of his own from India. Having faced the challenge of managing large, distributed teams, they conceived of a solution that provides automated visibility and helps optimize the delivery performance of global teams. Thus Sapience was co-founded by Shirish along with three others- Madhukar Bhatia, Swati Deodhar, and Hemant Joshi at Pune. Initiating sales in 2011, in just 2 years, Sapience has scaled to 60+ installations and 60,000+ users. Sapience customers include 2 Fortune Global 200 firms, several billion dollar global ISVs, 3 of India's Top 10 and 8 of India's Top 25 IT companies, and many medium and small firms in IT, Engineering Services, KPOs and Finance.

Getting a grasp
Sapience is software that discovers work effort for each individual in a highly automated manner, while being smart enough to ignore personal time, thereby respecting individual privacy. Sapience delivers a 20+% gain in Work Output for companies whose staff uses computers to perform their job, either in the office or elsewhere. More importantly, it then provides the ‘big picture' about work patterns at every level of the business. Managers can set goals for reasonable work hours and activity focus, while teams and individuals can then make self-improvements to attain those objectives. Key features include automation of work pattern collection, organization level rules combined with user level learning and personalization, work pattern roll-up based on organizational hierarchy, and integration with other entities that maintain user work data.

In current state, managers only track deliverables; there is no visibility of the effort deployed to complete a task. Sapience makes the efforts of an employee visible to the employee himself as well as his superiors. This brings in work transparency and promotes performance driven work culture.

Facing Bottlenecks
Sapience has followed the classic innovation curve. When the first release of the product was ready in late 2010, Deodhar reached out to a large number of his contacts. It was difficult for a CEO to be the first to persuade their team about a product whose purpose appeared to be tracking what employees were doing. Early innovators like the India head of IDeaS (SAS subsidiary) and the CEOs of Zensar and KPIT Cummins realized the value of Sapience, and decided to adopt it for their organizations.

"As we acquired more and more customers, it became progressively easier to persuade CxOs at other and increasingly bigger companies. Our initial customers helped validate the product concept, refined the positioning and messaging to employees, provided valuable feedback on improved functionality and new capabilities. All suggestions, internal and external, are reviewed on weekly basis by a product management team. They either made it to the next release, or became part of the roadmap, or were dropped. In any case, we would revert to our customers at regular meetings to indicate our roadmap and how/where their ideas were being incorporated (or explain why they were not)," adds Deodhar.
India is regarded as a challenging market for a Made-in-India software product company. According to Deodhar, there are several factors which contribute to this. First, there are hardly any Indian product success stories. Secondly, customers do not want to try new product from an emerging company, especially an Indian one. It is safer to buy from a known international brand. "India is admittedly a difficult market in which to sell enterprise products, especially from a new company, and even more so for a ‘Made in India' product. Yet, Sapience has been successful so far because it is a unique product that delivers 20+% productivity gain, which is of compelling value to organizations," comments Deodhar. The ecosystem is undergoing gradual change. More product companies are emerging and beginning to make their mark in India and beyond.

Pricing is always a challenge for a young company. There is no right or wrong price. It is the customer's willingness to pay for the value they perceive from the product. "Since we are the only player in the Enterprise Productivity space, there is no benchmark on pricing that our customers can refer to and then value Sapience against. Assuming the company does gain 20% productivity increase, then the corresponding value is around `100,000 per employee per year (at India salaries). Our pricing is designed to deliver at least 10X return on investment," adds Deodhar.

Combating Competition
Sapience has been in the fortunate position of being the first mover in the Enterprise Effort space. "I am sure there will be competition in future. But if you are the leader, and others are chasing you, you have two choices. First is to keep looking back, and run the risk of slowing down or worse still, tripping. Second is to go full-steam ahead keeping only a side view for anyone approaching. Obviously, we have adopted the second approach," concluded Deodhar. The firm's growth trajectory can well be judged from their user which has increased from 5,500 in March 2012, to 35,000 in March 2013, and is expected to touch 75,000 by March 2014. Sapience intends to expand globally starting 2014, and is readying a version for international customers.