Digite Product Management

Right way to build brand!

noreply@blogger.com (Digite Product Management) — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 10:31:00 +0000

Google named world's number 1 brand!

Google has been named the world's number one and most powerful brand for the second year in a row, with an estimated value at $85,057 million. This, according to BrandZ's top 100 brand ranking for 2008.

If you notice a company such as Nike is coming at #53. This is very surprising to me! I see lot more advertising and marketing done by Nike as compared to Google. These days every sport that you see on TV has Nike sponsorship! This holds true from US athletics to European soccer leagues to the latest Indian Premier League! You do not see any advertisements by Google at sports events, on billboards (except may be in Mountain view CA), or on TV! Despite that it is coming in at #1.

This talks a lot about the popularity of Google and it's products. If you build the right product that solves right problems, people will notice you! Brand equity you build this way is long lasting and it is the right way to build brand awareness!

-Suhas A. Kelkar
VP Product Management, Digite

Process Becomes a Breeze in Tampa at SEPG North America!

noreply@blogger.com (Digite Product Management) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 06:33:00 +0000

Posting a conference report from Mike Amend who is a Senior Director, Business Development based out of US.

Digite definitely led the wave of Process Improvement on the beautiful shores of Tampa Bay. Although, I can assure you our feet never had the time to touch the beautiful sands of the pristine Florida beaches! Our time was overwhelmed with interested parties from the United States, Europe, South America, Asia and parts unknown (California?). Even though this was SEPG North America, the rest of the world was very well represented!

Digite attended and exhibited at the 20th Annual SEPG North America, March 17 – 20. The reception of our solution to those most interested in Process Leadership was extraordinary! These people knew the importance of process, but also knew that the supporting pieces of our holistic solution solved many of their common issues that doomed the best honed process. Vision from our Project Portfolio and Management piece of our solution, coupled with out completely integrated Collaborative Software Development pieces (Requirements, Change, Document and other IT Management needs) provided the support to both monitor, measure and enforce process throughout the Enterprise. They were AMAZED they could get this all from one, web-based tool! They had all been forced to use lightly interfaced point-solutions that did not work well together – even if all came from the same vendor! Because we were so different, Digite was a BIG hit!

The show was attended by Ram Subramanian, Mahesh Singh, Mike Amend and Rahul Kapoor. As usual, the four of them traveled quite well together and found the food of the Tampa area exceptional! Mike and Mahesh judge the culture of any destination by the quality (and quantity) of the cuisine at the best Thai Restaurant in the area! They were pleased to say that Tampa Thai is some of the best (and most abundant) they have enjoyed outside of Thailand!

Next year, the SEPG conference will be hosted by San Jose and I am sure that Digite will make the grade again as one of the Premier stops within the Exhibit Hall for those interested in Process Improvement and Governance within the Application Lifecycle Management of the Enterprise.

We look forward to seeing you there!
-Mike Amend (You can reach me at mamend at digite dot com)

this is how buzz words are born...say hello to "synchromesh"

noreply@blogger.com (Digite Product Management) — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 04:22:00 +0000

Ever wondered when/where buzz words are born...Recently Ray Ozzie had a keynote speech at the Mix 2008 conference and I was able to spot birth of a new buzzword, "synchromesh"

Ozzie teased the next evolution of his decades-long exploration of synchronization and collaboration, which he referred to as a "seamless mesh"--or what I'll call "syncromesh"--in his Mix '08 keynote in Las Vegas:

Just imagine the possibilities of unified application management across the device mesh, centralized, Web-based deployment of device-based applications. Imagine an app platform that's cognizant of all of your devices. Now, as it so happens, we've had a team at Microsoft working on this specific scenario for some time, starting with the PC and focused on the question of how we might make life so much easier for individuals if we just brought together all your PCs into a seamless mesh, for users, for developers, using the Web as a hub.

Mark my words, if Microsoft is successful in pushing their agenda, then you will be hearing more and more of the word synchromesh until it will be come part of the Oxford dictionary. Just recently I talked at a conference about SaaS and had made a slide that shows the logical progression of technologies. I guess now I must go back to it and add synchromesh :)

Firefox 3 five times faster than IE7...wow!

noreply@blogger.com (Digite Product Management) — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 16:24:00 +0000

Firefox 3 Beta 4 is 5x faster than IE7, 3x faster than FF2 by ZDNet's Ed Burnette -- The almost-but-not-quite-final beta of Firefox 3 (FF3 beta 4) is now available for download. The most noticeable improvement is speed. In some tests, it’s three times faster than Firefox 2 (meaning the test completes in 1/3 the time), and a whopping five times faster than IE 7: (Source: Mozilla Links) Other improvements in beta 4 include: Smarter [...]

Project Portfolio Management yields results

noreply@blogger.com (Digite Product Management) — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 05:23:00 +0000

I have been involved with PPM domain for quite a few years now. I have seen the very beginnings of the project portfolio management when we had to not only write software that would enable PPM but had to go out and educate customers on the importance of PPM tool. That was the time around 2001-2002 when companies were strapped for cash. Also around the same time, Sarbanes Oaxley was just getting defined and corporate IT folks did not know what changes it really meant for them.

There were just a few players in the PPM domain and many of them simply grew out of their project management, rather than have a vision for top down portfolio management and setting up a PMO practice/processes.

Fast forward to 2008, and finally I am seeing studies that validate the usefulness of a PPM tool. See an in depth article, "ROI study: Product portfolio management yields results" posted to ZDNet.

The entire post on ZDNet is worth reading. But here is the most important section of it,

Key findings from the study include “savings of 6.5% of the average annual IT budget by end of year one and 14% (NPV) over a three year deployment period.” In addition, the PPM software examined:

Improves the annual average for project timeliness dramatically by 45.2%.
Reduces IT management time spent on project status reporting by 43.2%, reclaiming 3.8 hours of each manager’s workweek.
Reduces IT management time spent on IT labor capitalization report by 54.7%, recouping 3.6 hours per report.
Decreases the time to achieve financial sign-off for new IT projects by 20.4%, or 8.4 days.

Notice that not only it says that PPM tool will give you savings in terms of dollars but it also improves projects delivery by 45%. Sometimes people focus too much on the direct dollar benefits from a PPM tool and they miss out on the benefits such as increasing project timeliness etc.

I am very glad to see such reports coming out which validates my belief in the rigor of having PPM processes and tools in an IT organization.

NASSCOM Product Conclave Conference 2007

noreply@blogger.com (Digite Product Management) — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 05:09:00 +0000

NASSCOM Product Conclave

This week I was able to attend the first ever NASSCOM conference targeted towards product companies based out of India. Having realized the trend in Indian IT companies to shift up in the value chain from services to products it is quite appropriate for NASSCOM to start this initiative.

The conference was attended by who’s who of the Indian IT companies. CxOs and VPs from reputed product companies such as Subex Azure, Yahoo, Philips R&D and of course digité ;) were present for the conference.

The keynote speech by Sabeer Bhatia was the highlight of the conference. He made some very insightful remarks and said that for product companies to be successful they need to,

Challenge the status quo: Here he gave an example of iPod. When iPod came out there already were 30-40 MP3 players in the market. But Apple was able to challenge the status quo in that market and invent new market for themselves via innovative design.
Think out of the box. Sabeer criticized and cautioned that Indian educational system is such that we are not trained to ask questions. You cannot build new and successful products by just doing more of what is already known. You need to think out of the box. Product development needs to be disruptive and not incremental.
Take more risks. Sabeer quoted that silicon valley is built on failures not on successes. Nine out of ten companies fail before one succeeds. Hence it is essential to take more risks.
Think global. Build products that solve global problems not just india’s problems.
It takes time to build a successful product company. 4-5 years are needed to successfully build and launch a product. He mentioned how lucky he was to conceive, develop and launch hotmail in just 18 months which was a lucky anomaly.
Products are built not by large teams but small teams of highly motivated individuals. Founders of the product companies need to have product DNA!

Throughout the first day it was clear that no one was sure about the exact definition of the term “product”. It was finally Samir Palnitkar of Airtight Networks who put it in simple terms. He proposed a definition for the term product as, “Anything that scales disproportionately and does not require additional human resources for scaling up”.

Services companies have the distinct disadvantage that they have to increase their head count in order to scale in terms of revenues. On the other hand product companies, with an initial investment for building a product can then scale and sell it to as many people as they can, without too much additional cost. Incidentally, this is why the valuation for a services company is 1-1.5x (of revenue), whereas for a product company it is around 3-4x. An interesting comment from Dr. Lin L. Chase (Sr. Vice President, Technology R&D-India, Accenture) was that she has seen recently that product companies with SaaS offerings are demanding 6-7x valuation!

There were few other very insightful remarks by many other individuals. I won’t be able to attribute them correctly but will still list a few of them. Someone gave excellent advice to new upcoming product companies in India, “to spec the product globally but sell it locally”. Idea is to make the product successful in the local market before undertaking the global market challenges. The talk by Ashish Gupta of Helion Venture capital was very impressive.

One other remark was also very good. It was that don’t position your Indian product company on the basis of cost advantage (due to low labor costs). Instead of using the “low cost advantage", position it as “innovation leverage”. E.g. instead of saying that you can build the product for 1/3^rd of the cost, you can say that you can innovate three times more for the same amount of dollars!

Interestingly everyone was in agreement that “any arbitrage will tend to eliminate itself over time”. So the cost advantage enjoyed by Indian software services industry is going to be fetching diminishing returns. This is going to create some interesting conditions for the local IT market and will push it further in the direction of higher margin business models such as becoming product development companies.

All in all, I had a very good time at the conference and am looking forward to attending and participating in more such events by NASSCOM.

-Suhas A. Kelkar
VP, Product Management,
Digite

my first blog...

noreply@blogger.com (Digite Product Management) — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 10:31:00 +0000

After lot of procrastination, I have finally gotten around to creating a blog page. I plan to brag-err-blog about our product features and other general things that pertain to various topics such as,

Project Portfolio Management
Application Life cycle Management
SaaS, Web 2.0
etc. etc.