TechSparks 2010, Winner in the Popular Category -George John Vettath Founder, Kallos Solutions Pvt. Ltd.

Kallos…at the forefront of a changing paradigm in the Indian IT industry

The 1990s heralded the growth of India as a global giant in the IT industry; however competitive advantage dictated that India’s focus within the IT industry remained on services and project execution as opposed to product development. Product development was seen as a high R&D investment game with little “annuity” or regular cash flows seen on the services side, and hence best left to the global biggies in the arena like IBM, SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, etc. In 2003, George foresaw a confluence of new technologies and business models around model based rapid development and Software as a service (SaaS) emerging that he expected would lead to an eventual restructuring of the Enterprise Applications market. These emerging new technologies provided an opportunity for newer players to enter into an established product technology development market dominated by few players.

It was the recognition of this paradigm shift in the IT industry coupled with the passion of technology development as opposed to plain vanilla execution that made George Vettath quit his job at Ramco Systems to found Kallos Solutions. “Disruptive technologies for rapid develop of scalable applications, shared deployment over the web and agility in serious enterprise applications were becoming available. That was the prime reason for the timing of my plunge into the entrepreneurial world. SaaS and platform based approaches are now becoming popular and I am glad we made the right choices early on”, says George.

The Genesis of Kallos…from a Corporate Director to 3 years as a Product Developer

An electrical engineer from NIT Calicut and an MBA graduate from the Graduate School of Business, University of Sydney, George is an IT stalwart having over 21 years of experience in the industry. Having served in marquee companies like CMC Ltd., Telstra and Ramco Systems, George had the opportunity to gain cross functional expertise in product management, sales, project management, development and customer support. His core expertise includes Enterprise Applications and Products (ERP, CRM, HR and Supply Chain Management), SaaS, PaaS, Model Based Development, Product Management and Entrepreneurship.

A firm believer in product development, candidly accepts that “developing new technologies is a passion” for him as he is “driven by the desire of creating something new”. It was this desire that drove him to leave a high profile role as Corporate Director – Enterprise Solutions at Ramco

Systems and invest 3 years of his life in developing the Kallos suite of enterprise software products. George’s vision found early and staunch believers in his core team of ex

ecutives whom George describes as the “backbone of the company responsible for handling consulting, product development, technology, human resources and administration”.

Kallos Today…

From humble beginnings in 2003, Kallos now prides itself as an enterprise application expert across multiple industry verticals. Kallos Solution today offers a range of powerful Enterprise class products and solutions, in the areas of CRM, HR/ Payroll, ERP and Retail. These solutions, running on the Microsoft .NET™ platform, are highly flexible and adaptable to individual verticals and organizations since they are built on a powerful rapid application development platform. The same platform is used to provide custom applications at efforts that are far lower than conventional approaches. A team of 12 employees based in its head?office at Chennai services over 100 customers providing product enterprise applications to cater to clients’ needs. Kallos has segregated its enterprise application offerings in two divisions – Product Division and Platform Division. The Product Division offers standard enterprise applications across a host of functions including sales, CRM and human resources catering to cross vertical point solutions for mid size companies. “For its product division as a full suite product vendor the company can be termed as early growth. This is because the products are proven with customers, and a regular stream of profitable revenue currently occurs in the Chennai geography”, explains George. The newer division – Platform Division, utilizes the core Kallos Platform for Accelerated Development to offer large corporates customized Enterprise application suites. Kallos has drawn aggressive plans to “go to market on Mainstream PaaS globally”, says George with eagerness detailing the PaaS potential to YourStory. “PaaS customized solutions are currently in the pre?launch stage since the full product has not yet been released to the market, though the core platform is already proven across so many products and customers.”

Over 100 satisfied customers across 5 countries…Understanding the customer’s needs and delighting the client has been the driving principle for George in his bid to create technologies that satisfy client’s needs. Explaining his company’s prime differentiator, George says that, “the K Serve www.KServe.net of products provides comprehensive functionality & technology relevant for the customer space at an affordable price with reduced time to benefit, resulting in a quicker and higher ROI”. This unique positioning has helped Kallos exponentially increase its client base over the past few years. In addition, “all the products are built on a common and proven rapid application development platform, enabling high levels of extendibility with low effort and cost. Multinational vendors which provide comparable full suite service come at a much higher cost”, beams George. This relentless focus on “client?delighting product technology development” resulted in Kallos being selected as one of the 12 vendors among 62 during Product Showcase – 2010, a Joint event conducted at the CIO and Nasscom Emerging Companies’ Forum

Roadmap for the Future…

With a firm foothold established in Chennai, George is now gearing to go pan India and overseas. Always the one to look to address customer needs, George believes that the SMB market has just opened up and he is well positioned to meet its diverse needs with investments already made in the past few years on a range of products, platforms and proven processes. “The multiplier effect by geographical presence, number of product variants, order size and partner ecosystem will provide the momentum for the scalability”, details George explaining his scale?up plans. Kallos is well?positioned in its segment coverage as the segments of the SaaS market that are expected to drive growth for the next three years include procurement, human capital management, and customer relations management as per a Gartner report. The company is currently fully self funded from sources such as initial capital, loans from directors, sweat equity from directors / employees and internal accruals from projects. “Since we are now moving to the

growth phase funding is a key priority”, says George, “we are currently in dialogue with investors to raise the requisite funds to put our growth plans in action”. Signing off, George shares his success mantra with YourStory readers – “the more you accomplish, the more you realize how integral your core team and family is to your success…getting a right team early on is critical to success”. YourStory wishes George and his team all the success in putting India on the global IT product map in the near future.