 "NASSCOM Confers Lifetime Achievement Award On Bharat Goenka")
The NASSCOM Product Conclave, has conferred, for the first time, a Lifetime Achievement Award to Bharat Goenka of Tally. With more than 2 million customers today, Tally is a shining beacon for thousands of product entrepreneurs in India. Goenka is often referred to as the “father of the Indian software product industry” given the fact that he was amongst the first to develop products for the Indian market using just a Personal Computer more than three decades back.
NASSCOM also announced its list of Emerge-10 Companies basis rigorous rounds of evaluation. The Emerge-10 companies for this year are – AliveNow Inc., Capillary Technologies, Forus Health Pvt. Ltd., iDuple, Innoz Technologies Pvt. Ltd., MobMe Wireless Solutions Pvt. Ltd., TELiBrahma Convergent Communications Pvt. Ltd., Wingify, Wifinity Tech, Zenga Media Pvt. Ltd.
NASSCOM arrives at the Emerge-10 list out of applications for NASSCOM Emerge 50 awards on a predefined questionnaire/ application form and sorts them by categories viz. Innovation, Growth, & Startups. Participating companies are then evaluated (through a mathematical model) on a number of parameters including financials, growth, market differentiator, customers, market visibility, and distribution/ GTM. Companies that are shortlisted have to then make in-person presentations in New Delhi & Bengaluru to arrive at the list of top 10 companies. This year, there were 267 applications received by NASSCOM.
Fifteen of the Emerge 50 companies were from Bengaluru area followed by the NCR with thirteen and Hyderabad with six.
Also recognised formally for their contributions to the software product ecosystem were Dorai Thodla for his overall contribution to the start-up eco-system, Sameer Guglani from the Morpheus Gang for enabling start-up incubation practice and George Vettiah from Kallos for his contributions to the NASSCOM Emerge community.
“With strong support for software products, India’s ability and prowess of building strong intellectual property can be parlayed into tremendous value in a global context. India with 200,000 R&D software engineers and one of the largest R&D footprints in the world has one of the strongest value-creation engines in software. The Government can be of immense support while still sustaining its role as a pure-play regulator and facilitator. For instance, in allowing the use of “card-not-present” recurring transactions which are less than Rs. 25,000 per month when the same card and same merchant id is used. This is required for SaaS based subscription revenue model based solutions. While most payment systems support this capability, government regulations do not allow it. This is an anomaly specific to India as no other major country has this regulation,” said Sharad Sharma, Chair NASSCOM Product Forum.
The Indian Software Product Eco-System is not only at a very interesting inflection point of acceleration but also manifesting interesting trends worth notice. The average three-year CAGR for the companies in the growth category was 81% which is far greater than the growth of the overall IT industry across the globe. Interestingly, 27% of all applied companies had witnessed a CAGR higher than 100% for the last 3 years.
Companies operating in the Niche Services (Internet, Mobile & Cloud) domain had a whopping average three-year CAGR of 108%. The average revenue per employee considering all companies in the innovation category was about INR 10.27 Lac. The average R&D Investment by companies in the innovation category for the last three years was INR 2.47 crore and cost reduction & enhanced productivity were the top end customer value additions enabled by innovation.
Sharad Sharma added, “Filing US patents is expensive. Today over 90% of the patents being filed are by the MNCs operating their R&D centers in India. Subsidy support is needed to grow the patent portfolio of the India product startups. China has also used a scheme like this to grow its patent portfolio.”